


Bridezilla vs. Birdzilla

by RainofLittleFishes



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Arranged Marriage, Aradia is a troll in both meanings of the word, Arranged Marriage, Aspects, Duty, Flaily Dork Dave, HSRarepairSwap2015, Humor, POV Dave Strider, Taxidermy, Unabashed Thievery of Quaint Wedding Customs By the Anthropologically Acquisitive
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-07
Updated: 2015-03-07
Packaged: 2018-03-16 19:45:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3500600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RainofLittleFishes/pseuds/RainofLittleFishes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aradia trolls Dave, they get hitched (for Reasons), and then she trolls him some more. Featuring Dave's entirely not-hysterical point of view, Karkat as the troll-maid-tron of his honor, entirely too many jars of dead things, Afterus, and gross inaccuracies regarding Canada:</p><p>You have a minor Aspect. It’s rare, but you can’t do anything with it, so you’ve never thought much about Time. You never thought that when you were busy miring yourself in the bureaucracy of joining the general jury pool and completing your voter registration you’d be signing yourself up for someone to browse the classified catalog and order you as a mail-order brobride.</p><p>As for how Aradia feels about your engagement, you don’t ask. You might as well ask why she always approaches you from behind if your back isn’t to a wall or why she now insists on referring to Bro as Dad or why her KangerSheepMom makes you treat all open spaces like an unending game of the-floor-is-lava. (The-Floor-Is-Lava echoes in your mind like that should be important somehow. Too late, (always too late?) the vague familiarity is gone, a dream fled upon waking.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Bridezilla vs. Birdzilla

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Laylah](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laylah/gifts).



“Dah-v _ee_ d, I have decided. Out of respect for your traditions, I wish to enact the human ceremony of a shotgun wedding. We will serve the most auspicious of moonlit beverages and wear fedoras. Do you want white or black for your bridal party and guests, or should we assign it individually based on whom we want as which pieces for the subsequent live action chess match?”

This comes from two inches behind your right ear and when you cracked the seal and lifted the sacred vessel of AJ (plastic # 1) a fraction of an instant previously, _there was no one in the room but you_. Your Intended is a menace. Technically you’re also not yet meant to be alone together. Not that you’re instigating any hanky-panky, Aradia Megido kind of terrifies you every bit as much as she intrigues you in that age-old human tradition of craving things that can kill you, but a bit of a buffer zone or warning would be welcome at this point.

Of course, your internal monologue isn’t quite so organized because you are preoccupied with a few very pressing basic hygiene and health issues occupying the entirety your respiratory system.

You don’t spit on yourself. You don’t. That would have been merciful by comparison, dignity be damned. You sort of breathe a pungent burning cloud of apple juice through all your facial orifices, (eyes, nose, throat, (lungs? _why?!_ ), and possibly _ears_ ,) and then attempt to cough up the aspirated material. Apple juice exacts revenge when it isn’t properly appreciated. You are sorry apple gods, please forgive you, you didn’t mean to disrespect their gift.

Why does Aradia always spring these things on you when you’re partaking in your personal stash of still sealed ambrosia, sacred communion with all that is right? Or engaged in something that _it is not entirely prudish_ _to expect some privacy_? And why are the wedding questions never done? There’s like a week to the ceremony, hasn’t everything been settled?

Is it sexism or speciesism to wonder why she thinks you care? Ten weeks ago you hadn’t even met her, despite multiple shared acquaintances of very unlikely probability, and you certainly didn’t have any plans to get married to anyone in the near future. Maybe some plans to panic over picking a major at community college, something tasteful where you would have spammed texts at Karkat in an escalating manner until he would have just surrendered and come over to shout at you in person and you would have focused on picking at his peccadillos instead of your insecurities.

It’s like she’s waiting just long enough between ambushes for you to _almost_ relax. (She wouldn’t _really_ be doing it on purpose, would she? If this was any other ass in your family or frenemy group the answer would be “hells, yes!”, but you can’t just go _assuming_ things about your Intended, that’s going to make the next however many decades until you keel over hella awkward.)

The answer to her questions is always the same anyway: “Ack! I don’t know!”. Which is still more polite than “WTF?!” Right? Karkat would know. This is why your one big decision was to delegate to Karkat wherever and whenever possible. It has been the only part of all of this that you do not in some way regret, even if you never admit it to him. You are absolutely not the dancing turtle in the cold war PSAs. You just happen to be ducking and covering a whole lot.

There was the question of who would give you each away: “Dahvid, _(Surprised in the shower = the fat squidgy bruise on your shoulder where you hit the wall.)_ the local laws forbid people as chattel and yet this issue of _Brides_ insists that the transfer of custody it is a custom of great emotional import. I propose that instead we have our chosen representatives duel to first blood for the amusement of our guests.”

Regret: covering your junk and screaming while ricocheting off the wall. Clearly you would have been better served to simply cover your own eyes. She can’t see you if you can’t see her. This is what you tell yourself. Lies. Lies and Karkat are your only allies.

Result: Terezi, who despite many years of cahoots and mutual harassment  with you has shown her true colors and rallied to Aradia’s side, will be dueling Bro. In compensation, you won Karkat as your best troll-maid-tron. Nepeta and Equius abstained from picking a side. Your disappointment with losing Terezi and the humiliation of being surveyed like a sack of (hot) nekkid (except for the bandages in plastic wrap on your arms) manmeat was only offset by your personal coup over winning Karkat. Also, Aradia wolf-whistled right before she left and you are equal parts embarrassed and intrigued. See: your lamentable fascination with things that can kill you.

There was the question of bouquets as sprung on you when you woke up from an uneasy sleep in a formerly locked room to the sensation (and reality) that someone was staring at you: “Dahvid, what is the significance of the bouquet flora? Should it contain certain chemical properties, physical efficacy as a weapon, or is it all symbolic for the fertility toss?”

(Regretful result: No embarrassing screaming this time, just falling out of bed onto your butt, as accompanied by “Holy Shhhhiiip! (Thud)”. You wonder how you tell if your coccyx is broken or just bruised.)

Result: You referred her to Karkat and now there will be one bouquet of thistly things for each of you. What makes the temporary inconvenience of having at least one hand occupied worth it? Evidently it’s better to have something that can be thrown from your person before the guests get to the “taking of tokens” or “shivaree” sections of the program.

Aradia assures you that it is especially lucky if you are able to scratch or contuse a seadweller with the token toss, which seems _oddly specific_ , especially as you don’t know any seatrolls. Weddings are complicated.

Aradia also claims this is all in respect to your human traditions on this side of the Gate but you absolutely know that she’s digging for the weirdest shit her anthropologically acquisitive mind can find. Bridezilla is clearly enjoying this way too much.

There was the still unresolved question of “the traditional wedding cup”, (another wasted bottle of AJ and the most painful “funny bone” bang you’ve ever experienced) which according to your Intended is a happy bit of coincidence with Afterus culture. The Afterus cup is “traditionally” the skull of some formidable beast slain by one of the two (or three, or four… quadrants make everything complicated) getting hitched, or one of their clade members or ancestors.

(Tangent (Everything Dave is tangential anyhow): There is nothing funny about funny bones no matter how many banging clown boner jokes you reflexively produce like a spleen produces bile. Nothing. Nothing to see here but a beautiful Dave mind breaking into little fractals as you surrender to the March of IDEKs of Time. Time (or rather the v. potent incarnation of it currently haunting you in preparation for moving into your fixer-upper of a mind) wears very practical shit-stompers under her skirts. Problem: you suspect the only shit they’ll be walking all over is you. To summarize: USS Dave is sinking. Is sunk. Whatever.)

To resume (imagine only that Time has stopped for a glass of water and, now refreshed, has picked up where you left off. _Cheers_.) Drinking out of the concavity that formerly hosted some monster’s brainmeats would in no way be the most disgusting thing you have ever done. It would actually be pretty cool, because you suspect you could convince Aradia to take you hunting on the Afterus side in order to provide your own cup, or rather one for your theoretical descendants/adopted spawn/sidekicks, or at least to do a bit of stalking something besides your own fine self.

The actual issue is that Afterus’s traditional brew is alcoholic and usually _psychedelic_ , and while the tradition is flexible enough that most regions have their own (fiercely defended) versions, the alcoholic and psychedelic parts are apparently non-negotiable.

You don’t have anything against someone _voluntarily_ taking a bit of something to take the edge off, you’ve had a few sips of this and that. Bro is a believer in the whole, ‘forbidding it just makes it more intriguing, drink up, little man, see what you’re not missing out on’. You had your first, and last, instructional hangover at fifteen and the beer tasted like yeasty piss going down and far worse coming up. As far as you’re concerned, alcohol has its place in social ties but no fascination.

The School of Bro Strider is the School of Hard Knocks and the Fine Appreciation of Those With and Those Without Knockers. You spent age thirteen getting ambushed by books, brochures, graphic novels of graphic nature, and PSAs on both sexual techniques and STDs. The Year of Thirteen is probably why you’ve never managed to get jiggy with anyone, even prom with Terezi was all chaste kisses. You talk a good game but your delicate heart needs fine dining and long walks on the beach. You want sex to mean something more than bodies and everything Dave is over-complicated. (Alas, if only Past-Dave had had the foresight to at least scan the troll sections of that flurry of educational materials, since melted away to places unknown. You might have some gnarly troll warts residing in the back of your brain, but at least you’d have a better idea of technique and expectations.)

So where does this all leave you? At the mercy of Aradia and your soon to be Sheep-in-law, among other things. You’re technically underage but you doubt that the US government is going to have you arrested for drinking a hand-fasting cup or a toast at a commitment ceremony that they helped arrange. Not that you’d put it past _any_ government to propagate the strangest of inefficiencies, but the alcohol is not the part that makes you want to get your Carrie Nation hatchet out.

There is absolutely, positively, negatively, Mobius-reach-around-NO-all-around, no fucking way that you want your friends and family and new clade-whatever to witness your first trip. You have strange dreams all the time. You don’t need to give them a bigger doorway to cram themselves through. You don’t want to get more closely acquainted with The Freaky Dreamscapes of Dave. You don’t look forward to Aradia learning that she’s just averaged her awesome with you and come out at a deficit.

This out of everything, the sense of inevitability, the responsibility, the endless ambushes, this altered state thing plus the whole freaking (freaky) mind-link thing is what makes you wake up almost ready to retch until all that you have been able to keep down in the past few days have been bananas, saltines, apple juice, water and a few other mild and boring things. Alas, no nuclear Dorito nachos for Dave.

Dirk, for the first time in your memory, didn’t even _do_ anything to you when you stole his candied ginger. Even Bro’s been letting you sleep late. This suspicious apparent kindness on both their parts makes it worse. You don’t pretend to understand troll “pity” but human pity isn’t the most flattering of emotions. You don’t like it. You’re an ungrateful snot, but there you have it.

As for how _Aradia_ feels about your engagement, you don’t really want to ask. She certainly appears to be willing. She’s been working hard to convince your shy maiden heart and you’ve been mostly unable to muster up a competitive counter-courting.

You might as well ask why she always approaches you from behind if your back isn’t to a wall or why she now insists on referring to Bro as “Dad” or why her KangerSheepMom makes you treat all open spaces like an unending game of the-floor-is-lava. ( _The-Floor-Is-Lava_ echoes in your mind like that should be important somehow. Too late, (always too late?) the vague familiarity is gone, a dream fled upon waking.)

A rogue thought as you hack at the liquid rattling in your lungs postulates that if “Dad” and “Mom” have more kids, they’ll be the deadliest larvae on the block. Nope. Denied. Shoved under the rug. Goodbye, tiny sheeple-buglet-siblings, the world was not ready for bladed head-butts, perhaps you ought to redirect your attention and parenting to Dirk as he is now legal to drink on this side of the border and still hasn’t moved out. You’re only legal to drink in Québec and it still isn’t worth it because your French really sucks. You rather regret that as francophone African rap and hip-hop is the bomb.

If you had had a (perhaps more normal?) childhood free from regular ambushes, swords in the fridge, a stash of cup ramen and smuppets in the trapped trapdoor, and an OCD middle brother who _always knows_ when you move something of his and exacts _entirely disproportionate_ revenge, you might have already developed a case of paranoia or agoraphobia in the month since you became Intended.

As it is, you know all the people who are out to get you and they mostly love you in an trollish way. Some of them are horned trolls. Some of them are just horny trolls. Okay, that was just lame. Bro is, but Dirk would probably only recognize a sex drive if it rolled up on a titanium chassis and role-played decision trees at him. This is why Dirk will never find his one true significant other. No one else is quite _other_ enough to enact the necessary quaint mating rituals. Not even Equius, the cahooter.

The Realms were not ready for Dirk’s obnoxious robo-ankle-biting spawn anyway.

When his Aspect Assessment came through Dirk came back Class 5 Heart, Class 1 Artifice, all nicely input in little pictorial representations, and no draft, pardon, you mean ‘ _mandatory government employment’_ , which just goes to show that Class has about zero effect on what a person is like or vice versa.

If _who_ Dirk is determined _what_ he is, then he’d be Class 8+ Artifice and Class  < 1 Heart. You don’t know anyone, including Equius, who is more awkward with feelings. Dirk is like a bull in a china shop, the china shop being all the social niceties and commonly understood human methods of social cues. You sometimes wonder if Dirk would have been better off raised by trolls. Then you wonder when you got so racist.

Afterians might, in some situations, be more physically demonstrative in both overtures and defense, less left to the interpretive vagaries of specific wording and connotations, but they also have a whole system of pheromone cues that no human but a Breath Aspect could hope to perceive completely.

You don’t understand Aradia very well yet, though the enthusiasm and trolling you comes through pretty clearly, but it feels like an insurmountable barrier to know that you’ll never be able to fully perceive her cues, even when you’re buried in one another’s minds and perceptions.

Karkat, raised in a mixed human and troll society as he is, has learned to mute his pheromone signals and broadcast his body language instead, though you can only attest to the latter. (Karkat is very shouty and he’s also the perfect height for an armrest. This is clearly why he’s your favorite. Nothing else. Nothing to see here, move along.)

Karkat’s older brother, Kankri, can switch between Afterian and human signals, and though you have to take Karkat’s word for at least part of it you can remember that Kankri certainly _seemed_ different on all those school break fieldtrips into Afterus. (How did he not just dump you all out of his minivan and _leave_ you?! See: Dave Strider is a snot, Karkat Vantas is an enabler, and Terezi Pyrope is an instigator.)

Aradia’s moirail, Sollux, is so Afterian that his English has an undertone of buzzing when he talks, not that you’ve met him more than once, despite his years of mutual frenemy/flirting/pestering with Karkat through the cross-Gate net.

Sollux was Aradia’s main stipulation in the pre-nupt, she’s not letting a bit of governmental interference trod on her pale quad, so apparently you’ll be seeing a whole lot more of him even though _officially_ you’ll be at least partially in Aradia’s pale quad. The default troll-human marriage equivalent is flush-pale and you don’t really want to be pitch or ash with Aradia (okay, so there’s a passing fascination, but you’re trying not to be stupid about this) so you left that part of the pre-nupt unchanged and don’t think you mind that there’s already one ass occupying part of the territory. It would be really shitty of you to _want_ Aradia to be as upset about this as you (definitely) are ( ~~not~~ ).

No one’s mentioned anyone in Aradia’s flush quad, so hopefully Sollux is the only third party being inconvenienced by all this razzmatazz. You anticipate that Sollux will provide you many years of front row viewing of Karkat-baiting and look forward to that at least. You kind of want to dig your fists right into Sollux’s thoracic cavity and record and mix and _manipulate_ that buzz and electricity, but you know enough of the inside-outside Strider House Rules that that’s on the list of “things-we-don’t-say-in-outside-company-lil-man”.

Sollux is _different_ enough, not just his glowing eyes or ozone-and-Cheetos smell, but his body language and his freaky (amazing, hilarious) harmonics, that you can appreciate his horrible sense of humor and still retain a sense of composure and distance, cultural gulfs that you know are there and don’t pretend to feel like you’ve crossed.

Aradia is camping out in the uncanny valley in her prim skirt-and-blouse combo sending you smoke signals and sniggering.

(If you were at this moment in Time to check back in with your suffering body, you’d note it’s still suffering. “How did this happen?” wheeze your innocent bronchi. “Well,” returns your tearing eyes, “I am prepared to blame it on the red tape. Can’t escape the miles of red, bitches.” Nope, you don’t really want to be Dave’s bronchi right now.)

Three months ago you turned eighteen and did your duty as a citizen registering for the draft by mail and stopping by the government clinic to have your blood drawn for the Adult Aspect Assessment. There are a non-literal metric shit ton of conspiracy theories on the net about what the government _does_ with all these specimens from newly-turned-18-year-olds, everything from “they’re cloning people” to “they’re infecting us with mind-control nanites” to “they’re performing demon summoning rituals”.

The last is your favorite because it usually also specifies something about virgins and it amuses you more than it should to think that somewhere there would have to be a government definition of virginity, like this giant checklist of sexual or potentially sexual actions or feelings and some poor sod, probably a Seer like Kankri, because there really isn’t any _science_ that covers this, would have to go feeling up all these little vials of blood for the esoteric properties of purity or whatever.

You assume that eldritch abominations, like the World Gates and nuclear waste, are difficult things to negotiate with.

(When Kankri started his job as a Seer at the Department of Aspect Assessment a double handful of months ago you sent him a nice little printout of the best of internet paranoia and a copy of _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_ , wrapping the entire thing in brown craft paper, string, and one pertinent Sharpie’d question: “But who _is_ Mercer?”. Kankri, in a definitive proof that he has a sense of humor, (which Karkat refuses to belief despite the physical evidence), sent you a postcard of bighorn sheep in the Tetons with two words: “Y9ur M9m”.)

In the midst of a ten page questionnaire that was all for the privilege of getting some stranger to stab you and abscond with your blood, you had briefly wondered if it wouldn’t have been easier to just try to defect to Canada. Universal healthcare. Mmmm. Baby seals for breakfast, not so much. Okay, your neighbors across the river are pretty much exactly like you. Except more French. The general proportions of douches to regular ~~Joes~~ Jacques-es is pretty much the same. Except more French.

You have a minor Aspect. It’s rare, but you can’t _do_ anything with it, so you’ve never thought much about Time.

You never thought that when you were busy miring yourself in the bureaucracy of joining the general jury pool and completing your voter registration you’d be signing yourself up for someone to browse the classified catalog and order _you_ as a mail-order brobride. That only happens in Karkat’s weird romance novels. _That only happens to Class 10s and above_.  Karkat is (was) the only person you know to be a Class 10 and you tease him about his shitty choice in movies and his shitty choice in books, but you’ve _never_ teased him about the arranged marriage trope because that’s hitting below the belt.

You’re a Class 1. You’ve always been a Class 1. Even if they somehow think you’re a Class 12 now, it’s _clearly a mass hallucination_. Too many people sniffing the Wite-out in an unventilated backroom somewhere. You’d be a Class _0.25_ or something if the scale went lower than one. Even the kid in your graduating class with like _0.75_ Breath can flit leaves around or scent track like a bloodhound as long as the trail’s fresh. Okay, maybe not a _bloodhound_ , but at least like one of those ladies you see sniffing armpits on the vocational brochures entitled “So You Think Your Job Is Bad”.

You with your Class < 1 can occasionally hear noises that might or might not exist. Not even useful noises, no Seer sense here, just the occasional clang or tick, all probably things like the house settling under a load of snow. If you lay a good track or synth ‘em together, that ain’t Aspect, that’s _talent_ , and you’re damn proud of it. You have to be proud of _something_.

Dirk is an engineering _genius_ , graduated from college and back home in the basement already, and Bro’s smart but never had a chance at the same schooling. Bro runs a machine shop and Dirk has always been happiest when surrounded by power tools that give him an excuse to keep his Peltors on and ignore people.

You always intended to get out of the house someday, but this wasn’t how you planned to do it.

Things you have perhaps irrationally feared: losing your sunglasses on one of those winter days when the sun on the ice-encrusted snow is like a spotlight and ducking into a bank to get out of the glare but _finding the entire bank staffed and patronized by red alligators (how stupid is that?!)_ , public speaking, getting shot for wearing a hoodie.

Things you never thought to fear: arranged marriage, Kankri actually knowing something relevant to you and not preemptively talking your ears off about it, a she-sheep-in-law that wants to knock you into next Tuesday.

What filial duties does a brobride owe his future sheep-in-law? You don’t even. You have lost the will to even. This morning when the sun rose and the birds sang, somewhere else, because this is suburbia and the only birds are the crows that occasionally dive-bomb you and no one else, (like they somehow know what you did with their roadkill compatriots when you were twelve), you should have pulled your sheets back over your head and buried yourself under your pillow. Except that you can’t because Karkat confiscated your pillow for the wedding pile. You are in so deep that if you don’t miraculously learn to swim, you’re going to be learning to drown. (S.O.S. USS Dave Strider stranded on a remote island. Running low on supplies. _( ~~Out of clothes. Out of options. Out of your mind~~.)_ Out of tiny drink umbrellas and there’s no one left to eat.)

You’ve already promised to sign the contract to become Aradia’s bonded partner in work and life, her anchor on the more mundane side of human-Earth, a Realm with definite feels about the laws of physics. In gendered human terms, she’ll be your wife, and you her husband, the only thing left is one week (too long _and_ too short, Time is a vicious minx), signing the contract, and a ceremony of public humiliation.

You’ve provided all your stipulations and dueled her with twizzlers over the last few and that ratty stack of 8 ½ x 11” printer paper full of US and Afternian pre-nupt questions and coffee rings is _done_. Halleluiah. Financial sections, religious, family planning, sexual orientation and quadrant stipulations, etc., etc., all done, though more than a few were answered with a polite version of “IDK… we’ll figure it out if it comes up”.

All it needs is a bit of blood from each of you the day before for arcane majicks, some fancy calligraphy on vellum, thankfully provided by Rose, who can _probably_ be trusted with your blood and the right Intent, and can actually write legibly, three-for-three, and the contract will be all set to sign next week. And you’ll have avoided whatever passive-aggressive or excessively thoughtful gift Rose would have added to the wedding pile. Four-for-four, go Team Penguinzilla.

Stick a fork in you, you’re being served up to the hot troll babe and you still haven’t figured out how troll wedding nights _work_ , because _the internet is full of lies and porn_.

You know for a fact that Bro knows everything you need to know and you also know for a fact, it is in fact, **The Fact** upon which your entire childhood rested, the steady bedrock of knowledge and all the times you signed permission slips with your non-dominant hand or paid Dirk in ambient noise tracks to run interference, that _Bro_ is a bigger troll than anyone who has ever, or will ever, grow their own horns. Nope. Not asking.

Aradia waits for you to finish your attempted Darwin award aspirations before she informs you that she will, of course, wish to maintain arms for herself and her part of the wedding party, but that she sees no reason why your half can’t be armed too, “it shows respect and equality when both sides can get from contract signature to the wedding pile without _unnecessary_ bloodshed”.

The wedding pile. Oh shit. Full of your shared shit, all the junk from your old lives that you’re combining as well as all the gifts your guests will give you. (John will give you nothing but whoopee cushions, it won’t even be a surprise.)

You had had to clean out your old room just to be sure that there was nothing too embarrassing before Karkat and Equius came last week to seize it all. You hope they’re careful about how they store and/or engineer a pile from your dead-things-in-jars collection ‘cause you don’t want to lose them any more than you want to be bleeding out to the scent of carcinogenic specimen preservatives. Fun for the whole family-clade.

Before Karkat shouted him down, Equius tried to take the contents of your trash can, last-minute recipient of your cleaning frenzy, for “authenticity”. You’re unsure about how you currently feel about Karkat, your tiny, shouty, feely friend of many years _who has been_ _one of the three most powerful Blood Aspects in the Realms **all along, freaking Class 12,**_ and never bothered to inform you, but he gets the benefit of the doubt for not dragging a bin full of wrappers and used Kleenex to the mortifying spectacle of your public hitching. Should either of them ever get hitched, you will remember this. Yes, Equius, you will _remember_ this, and now that you’ll be bound to Aradia, it won’t matter which side of the Gate he get hitched on, _or how far into the future_ , you will be there to point, laugh, and provide embarrassing stories about all your shared public school days.

Karkat let you keep your mattress, bed sheets, comforter, undies, and hexPhone, but you haven’t seen your audio equipment or computer since and it’s making your fingers itchy. Dirk’s shirts and pants are too wide and it makes you feel smaller than usual, out of your depth. It takes a lot of cool to float a Dave iceberg and right now you’re down to maybe a quaint ice sculpture to keep the buffet passing the health inspection, just barely. Maybe you should hire out as an ice cube for a well-shaken martini instead – you’ve got the shaken part down pat. Sometimes you feel like time is skipping, like you’ve already experienced 11:32pm that night, or 6:41am came thrice, like you can hear a heartbeat in the walls. _Hello, yellow wallpaper_.

At least if you end up utterly mad, Aradia will probably still duty-pity you and not just lock you in the attic. Trolls are weird like that.

If you are current with your wedding planning (and there’s no guarantee that you are, it all sounds like la la la… JAWS ATTACK), the dubious wedding pile will be where all your guests will deliver you in the moments before they regain some basic decency and leave you to expire in peace or pieces at the manicured talons of your personal Bridezilla. Aradia has donned the title with great enthusiasm subsequent to you losing the twizzler duel over it. She has offered you the title of Birdzilla to match your (presumed) penguin suit.

You know how to take an invite. You gave her your best jar: two crows in formaldehyde set in a wood stand.

 _One for Sorrow, two for Mirth._ Felicitations and all that jazz. Caw, caw, motherfuckers. You might have been guilt tripped into this with PowerPoints of Gate disasters, but you’re going in unapologetically Dave.

(You hope Aradia doesn’t mind you keeping your roadkill fresh in the freezer. You tend to have a longer “to do” list for taxidermy than you have free time. Bro’s always limited you to no more than one raccoon or opossum at time, or a few squirrels or birds instead. You don’t know what his problem is, it’s not like he _needs_ the freezer space for pizza, he just gets takeout all the time. Besides, taxidermy and a sense of fine style have kept you ahead of your phone bill with enough left over for the petty cash fund. More places and people than you might guess are willing to shell out a few hundred for a woodland animal in fine duds. You have probably shipped several dozen primped squirrels in rainbow mohawks with complimentary packs of nut jokes.)

The stand to your prize is a music box and the jar rotates when it’s cranked. You’re Intended plopped it on the kitchen table and played it as soon as you gave it to her, not even needing to search for the button to press to pop up a section of the wood and reach the crank. Bro and the Sheep had pretended to be immensely interested in their beers on the couch. Dirk was somewhere in the basement workshop with the jigsaw going. It had been one of your few moments of official semi-privacy together since the Banns were read days before at the local World Gate.

You call it official semi-privacy because for several days now Aradia has been stalking you to ambush you with wedding details. You’ve declined the “Traditional Festivities of an Afterian Ritualized Pre-Bonding-Abduction”.  At the time, you just didn’t want to get sick if she slung you over her shoulder and absconded who-knows-where. She’s built curvy and muscled and you’re more stick than brick shithouse, you _know_ she could do it without psionics, but your digestion sack’s been having some _mad_ butterfly attacks, and you may even have had guilty thoughts over the political incorrectness of the human equivalent (‘ _Triggering,’_ accuses your internal Kankri, who, throughout your childhood, was like the smothering-but-not-entirely-unwelcome moral compass to Bro’s more laissez-faire approach to parental responsibilities) but since then you’ve come to think regretfully about your abandoned chance to elope to Romania. Or Afterus-Romania. You’ve been told Afterus has real live vampires.

At this point, if it got you out of a public ceremony, despite your delicate stomach, you would even try the “Traditional Delicacies of My People”, which everyone, _everywhere_ knows is really just a chance for the locals to try to squick the tourists.

You yourself have offered her some “Traditional Delicacies of the Northern American Human Cultures”: Aerosol Easy Cheese, Cool-whip, Spam, Slim Jims, Twinkies. She consumed them all with a smile and commentary as to their properties in relation to her secondary Aspect, Death. No one should look that damn elegant eating aerosol cheese from the can.

You suspect that you will not be so calm when presented with Afterus’s delicacies, which if US and Afterus media are to be trusted, are heavy on the fresh and squirmy. Your last hope is fair food. _Fried butter, you’re my only hope_. Alas, it’s still snow season in upstate NY, and fried butter is hibernating with all its fried relations. At least across the river you can get poutine year round.

At the reading of the Banns, you took your new tattoos from a set of very cheerful Life witches with very firm grips and you didn’t flinch any more than Aradia did. You read your part of the Banns without a quaver. _Karkat_ had cried. And you _had missed it_. So many possibilities. Squandered.

A tall rangy Afterus troll in mud paint and dreads had leaned down and patted Karkat on the head. Afterward Nepeta, who, as far as you are concerned, has throughout your shared schooling been Equius’s sole redeeming feature, bearing, as he does, entirely too many similarities to Dirk, had texted you a picture of their Moment.

During, you had been too preoccupied with not flubbing anything, panic muted to disassociation, Time slipping away. You had felt suddenly naked, as if strangers were turning to you to watch. Not cool, Dave. Not cool.

Looking at the picture you feel mixed feelings about it. One part ‘someone should sweep him off his feet, he deserves everything’ and one part, ‘mine, dammit!’, which is just wrong on several levels.

In your bro-to-bro moments with Karkat since you agreed to a very-heavily-pushed, governmentally assigned Aspect partnership, you’ve cracked a few layers further down into the soft and squishy bits of Karkat Vantas, best friend and unfortunate crush. For a guy who will shout anyone down in the defense of the romance drama, he’s never dated in the years you’ve known him. Not flush. Not pale. Not pitch. Not even _ash_ , (which is like the _training wheels_ quad for trolls, you don’t care if he hits you for saying it, it _is_ ). It makes you feel sad squishy feelings of your own to now know why.

How could you have known that as a Class 12 your short and easily riled bestie was just waiting for someone to tell him to sacrifice himself for the good of others, just waiting to be assigned a partner? Or a group? As a Class 10 an assigned partner is possible but not definite. At Class 12, well, if Kankri is a Class 12, he’s an exception.

Blood is good for making connections, for circulating courage and loyalty and a sense of shared purpose.

In its own way it’s more insidious than troll telepaths or empaths or even Heart Aspects.

When the Greeks held off the Persians at Thermopylae, King Leonidas was of the Blood. There’s still a thriving history nerd debate over if his secondary aspect was Hope or Doom or Breath or Rage, but no one denies that it was Blood that supported that tiny army against the vast sea of Persians. Kankri is a Seer. It was obvious that he’d be on the federal payroll by the time he graduated, an inevitability he put off by getting a doctorate and thereby managing to stay home long enough for Karkat to no longer legally need another guardian assigned. The private sector snaps up any Seers Class 3 and up, but that’s usually only after the governments get their pick. Seers usually can’t see their own futures, but you have no doubt that Kankri has always known certain inevitabilities.

Class 12. Shit. Class 12 is like _lock me up and throw away the key, I belong to Uncle Sam and Lady Liberty_. And whatever the Afterus and Canadian equivalents are. Skywhales and polar bears?

Kankri’s got that whole vow of abstinence going and you might have laughed with Karkat over how big a deal Kankri made about it, but it’s obvious now that he made it so obnoxiously obvious so that even if the governments guilt-trip him into a partnership, at least he can keep sex out of it. Not that pale is any less important to trolls. You suspect that for Kankri it’s far, far more important, but not exactly something you can get a quad exemption for if they do find him a partner. How would an ash Aspect bonding work anyhow? Since Karkat spilled the beans, you have no doubt that their shared ancestor, the one who you’ve never met but seen pictures of in the conspiracy rags covering UN meetings, is the third Class 12 Blood Aspect.

You still don’t believe your Assessment, it came back with all the blocks filled in for Time, all twelve. But they tested you a second time, Kankri actually flew in to run the test, and the only difference was that in the two weeks between tests Flame crept up another two blocks from one to three. You didn’t try to get tested a third time. You also didn’t try to stare at anything until it lit on fire. You’re all about self-possessed restraint and responsibility. Okay, so maybe you stared at a snowbank and willed it to melt faster. Surprise, no effect.

Only a week later, at home during school break, you were served a summons to show up at the local DAA for a compatibility test. You don’t know how that part works, what exactly they test for, but they took more blood and a bit of hair and full fingerprints. And a large section of your dignity then-you insisted, but nothing compared to what was to come.

The DAA tells you that you have a rare Aspect that can hold the tide against a major catastrophe. They tell you that it’s not widely publicized, but the World Gates are inclined to _wander_ unless they are actually prevented from doing so. This takes Time even more than Space.

They tell you that not everyone is called, but that you, David Strider, are being asked to step up for The Continued Peace of The American People.

Canada and Afterus only send you their persuasions after you agree to The Continued Peace of The American People. Canada and Afterus are a lot less schmaltzy about it. The Canadians send you a list of incentives including medical and dental. Afterus sends you Aradia Megido. Of the three, Aradia is the most persuasive, but Canada was a close second.

*

Aradia arrives at your humble abode on December 31st, 2014. Were you to ask her, she could tell you that it is 10:23:45 PM in your time zone, could give you the exact fractions of the seconds as she climbs the stairs, crosses the porch, rings the bell.

It’s snowing very lightly and the flakes catch in the fur of her hooded cloak so that she’s wearing a diadem of stars in the porch light. Dirk and Bro are out ringing in the New Year. You’re holding a wake for the old one and possible your hopes and dreams. Attendees: a few friends, some junk food, Dirk’s gaming equipment liberated from the locked box under his bed (practically an engraved invitation), one unexpected smoking hot Time troll with a wicked smile and a gentle voice.

Her eyes are coals, garnet gems, darker than Karkat’s, less obviously off the human scale of eye color. She is already standing squarely upon your cool, you are almost tongue-tied. You’ve dealt with Manly Strider Crushes like a monthly special, the grocery stores ought to publish them in their weeklies in all the sick sad sordid unrealized details, right between produce and the daily catch, but Manly Strider Crushes have never tried to set up a play date with a stranger. Dave Strider isn’t _easy_.

“Dah-veed Stry-dair?” You want to _eat_ that accent. You want to _wrap_ it around yourself and _roll_. You want to set it to music and spin it into the long night, _Oooh Baby_. You are as cool as an un-nuked cuke. You are as cool as a barefoot dude on a snowy porch. You are a smooth customer, you’ll have that accent on toast, please and thank you, _Ma’am_.

“S’up, Ms. Frozen Queen-of-the-Night? And it’s D _aa_ ve.” You’d put your hands in your pockets and exude nonchalance but you’re wearing sweats. It’s like the same thing, but with less pockets.

“If I would be Queen, it would be of only one Night.” She smiles at you, and your breathe catches. You can hear the capitals and a one night stand doesn’t match her inflections. That sounded like a promise.

You stand in the doorway, frozen behind your shades like Karkat’s computer that last time he downloaded something his Afterian frenemy sent him.  You might be there still except that Karkat thumps you one for leaving the door open to let the heat out and the cold in. You’re relieved for a moment, normal Dave is a go, you just need to find something to bitch about to Karkat to restore normalcy and fodder for bitching is never in short supply. But you can’t think of anything and you find yourself back inside with Jade and Nepeta’s Mario showdown, Terezi and Rose’s mocking commentary, and John’s indiscriminate popcorn tossing because he’s a sore loser.

Aradia fits in with the usual crew like a seal sliding back into the water with barely a ripple. With her cloak hung up she might be dressed for 1920s Indiana Jonesing, whip included, or she might just be a steampunk LARPer. She tosses popcorn back at John from angles he can’t match and meets Rose head-to-headshrinker and is gracious when Jade and Nepeta and even _Karkat_ trounce her in matches.

You’re unreliable rabbitroo of a heart might already be half in love but your head is quickly becoming charmed with how she fits with your friends. And frenemies. Terezi demands respect.

If behind your back, Karkat and Aradia exchange significant looks, if his mouth tightens and hers smiles sadly, you don’t notice.

*

A few days after you gift her your prize jar in recognition that this show is thoroughly on the road, (that this show is currently camping in a series of seedy motels and stealing the Gideon bibles _and_ the motel pens), Aradia returns your gesture of we-come-in-peace with a double-faced pocket watch. The cover is engraved with two phoenix, tiny bird skulls set over their heads like little helmets. The beaks are sharp, polished, striated gray and buff, the eye holes proportionate to an adult animal. No bird of prey on this side of the Gates is so tiny. You desperately want to examine the tiny alien bones of whatever they were. You suppose you’d settle for a sighting. Earth has hawk moths. Does Afterus have moth hawks?

 _Three for a Wedding, and four for a Re-birth._ Well played, Aradia, well played.

One clock face is fairly normal, proceeding forward in the general manner that time does. The smaller clock face is a countdown to the ceremony, and for all that sometimes recently it feels like Time is skipping backward and repeating, if you hold it to your ear, Time behaves.

For all that this was sort of sprung on you months ago, for all that you never met her until two months ago, Aradia knows you better than she ought, better than you think is explained merely by improbably shared friends. You wonder if Time shapes you both in such ways or if it’s happenstance. Time is a rare Aspect and you don’t have a lot of people to compare.

You know there’s another two powerful troll Time workers on the Afterus side of the Gate, Kankri told you as much when he delivered the prognosis of your doom, aka that you’d be marrying someone the governments picked as compatible and that there would be some things that could be negotiated and some not so much.

Kankri is the only one who bothered to explain why you’re getting _super-strict-no-divorce-allowed-married_ and not just long-term assigned with someone. Like, if you _really can’t_ work together _at all_ and even spades-hate or abducted-a-third-to-ash-it-up isn’t enough to keep you together/not-quite-at each other’s throats the most you can do is a _separation_.

The binding has to be permanent or the gestalt doesn’t work.

Kankri also warned you just how bad the “recruitment” tactics could get, told you in steady and sympathetic tones some past ‘regrettable incidents’ which you have absolutely no doubt you weren’t among the audience with the clearance to hear. He probably wasn’t even supposed to know some of that, but _Seer_ , there’s not much a government can do to firewall their existence.

You’ve never known Kankri to lie, except perhaps by omission. Even, sometimes _especially_ , when it would have made his life so much easier. If he tells you you’re up a shit-creek and offers you a paddle, well, even you are not so eager to spite yourself that you’d say ‘nah, man, gonna get my doggy paddle going on’.

Basically, you can either accept an arranged marriage now or someone, somewhere, (some _when_ , ye gods) would likely force you into it, because Class 12 Time is rarer than hen’s teeth, even counting the Afterus hens with chompers to rig the pool. In the US all they’d need to do is get you in trouble with the law. You wouldn’t even have to do anything, you can easily think of a few dozen ways or places that someone in on it could frame you. Prisoners can be assigned all sorts of unpleasant duties and who’s going to believe you were framed to _draft you_? Another country or individual could just kidnap you. Fun times. Option A is to go into it while you can still negotiate and keep all your rights as a citizen, even get a few more with dual or treble citizenship. You have little idea of how your Aspect works, only a passing familiarity with Afterian troll culture outside North America, and a sinking feeling of being totally outgunned by your Intended.

Time of any level is rare and the only Time Adherent you’ve met from your side of the Gate was a human nurse at the hospital 40 minutes away who could “heal” some types of injuries by very careful localized Time rushing and supportive Breath, especially helpful when torn flesh is at risk of outside infection. His wife is a well-regarded thoracic troll surgeon who can crawl Time to effectively work faster and cause less trauma to her patients.

You only met An because the school’s guidance counselor was determined not to let your weird Aspect defeat her record. It was perhaps _ironic_ that the only Time aspect that she could find in the area willing to talk was in a reciprocal binding with a troll. An had explained that human-troll like-Aspect-to-like-Aspect bindings are like sutures across the dual dimensions. He tried to explain what it felt like to have someone else in your head, what the world “looked” like when you were also scenting it and could sense distances and energies through a horn-sense, but you don’t think that it’s something words are prepared to explain.

An and Alexsi’s marriage stabilizes the hospital against premature wear, keeps all their machines somewhat affixed against the potential ravages of Time, though there’s nothing to be done about software advances, everything electronic will be ancient within the sweep even when it functions perfectly. Their shared effect is powerful enough that houses and cars in the area also fail to accrue quite as much wear as they ought. It’s actually pretty cool.

Every bit of Time that she slows and he speeds feeds back to the other like a hybrid car battery. Like if she’s pumping the “heat” out of a room and cooling it, he’s pulling it into a room that needs heating. Bound together as they are they’ve become a circuit as well as a suture.

Your binding, your _marriage_ to Aradia will help affix the World Gates against wandering for another century. There’s no guarantee that you’ll both live that long (you don’t have to live that long to get there, Time can totally cheat), but as long as you don’t mess anything up, your efforts, added to the existing Wardings, and all the other couples in the Warding matrix, (names and numbers all publicly withheld just like yours to keep the risk of sabotage low, and isn’t _that_ reassuring), will assure that at least the nearest of the 64 World Gates stay wherever they currently are, which is very much appreciated by just about everyone who likes to find things like houses, cars, highways, and cities in the places that they last left them.

The history books are pretty gruesome about what happens when the Gates go on walkabout and the PowerPoints of partially classified sections even more so. You can’t really object to an arranged marriage in the face of that. Well you could, but there are limits to how much of a jerk you’re prepared to be and “catastrophic” is the kind of adjective you find to be very persuasive.

Since the closest Gates will be most strongly affected by another gestalt duo, the US and Canadian governments, as well as the local Afterus provinces, are all footing the bill for the basic costs of the binding.  Not the cake or the clothes or the other weird personal frills, but the Mages or Witches, the tattoos, and, weirdly, the hall for the wedding pile. Pervs. After, you’ll be in their employ, a continued salary to maintain your health and your Warding. It’s a federal and international crime to kill a Gate Warder. It will be a federal crime to even injure you if it’s considered bad enough to interfere with your duties. You keep expecting someone to say, “Oops, we mixed up the test results, sorry you ended up with a double sleeve-ful of unnecessary magic tattoos.”

Except no one has. You with your pitiful tiny Aspect, supposedly powerful, effectively _not_ , are supposed to balance a psionic so powerful in Time and Death that she can pop backwards or forwards just to ambush you from two sides. Your arms itch as the tattoos heal and you don’t dare scratch in case it misaligns something.

You with your tiny flickering not-quite awareness of Time and pristine track record of exactly zero time manipulations are evidently very “compatible” with Aradia. No one will tell you how this is determined. Seers? Magic eight balls? Astrology calculations? Darts? Gullibility?

You are somehow unable to shake the thought that Kankri knows about every instance in which Karkat bitched about him and you sympathized. So maybe you sometimes even hypothesized a few further suppositions regarding Kankri Vantas. Just a few.

Kankri is a Seer. The blood samples get processed by computer, but anything anomalous gets run past a Seer and Kankri does do a lot of traveling between DAA districts. He tested your do-over blood test. You have your suspicions about his “officially” Class 8 Aspect. If he knew this was coming for you, _you really could have used a warning_.

An tried to show you how to at least feel Time, the two of you sitting in the Tim Horton’s off of 37, and when you closed your eyes you could smell coffee and hear people and you shifted a bit because your leg was starting to fall asleep, but there was nothing else. You told him thanks for the info, but clearly your Aspect was a meek little candle flame that needed a bushel basket under which to hide. You’re not convinced yet that that’s untrue.

Good old Ogdensburg, NY, home of the US-Canada-Afterus border and an ironically named Mexican restaurant. You’re gonna miss the Mexican pizza. It’s like a metaphor for your life, bread and circuses, flattened by the steamroller of the combined forces of bureaucracy and Bridezilla, flattened like roadkill. Mmm. You hope Afterus has pizza delivery and AJ.

You still don’t know if you’ve been assigned black or white for the wedding or not. Last week Aradia was learning to knit penguin sweaters from Rose. Penguin sweaters. For tiny penguins that are evidently sweater-less? Rose was betraying her one true love, knitting, and was crocheting penguin plushies, a development that worries you considering what Bro did when he started making plushies.

Your family tree sprouts weirdoes like it’s the last cash crop to save the farm, so large someone’s gonna have to import underpaid migrant workers just to get ‘em all to market before they spoil. You’re not half weird enough for these people. You’re a bad apple. A badass light gray sheep in a family of badass punks.

Your sorta-sister and your soon-to-be-spouse get along like a house on fire. You’re not sure why that’s generally considered a good thing as similes go, but it seems apt for the devastation that no doubt awaits you once Aradia learns all the deepest darkest secrets of your psyche and Rose finds out how much you flubbed the wedding night.

Aradia’s tiny bizarre sweaters were all red and rust, like all her penguins would clearly want to look like Kankri on his downtime. The politically correct term is burgundy or maroon but Aradia prefers rust as it implies a _process_ and a certain passage of Time. You can respect that, you just worry about how she plans to process _you_. Next week you’re going to have a whole lot of company in your head, okay, one more person, but that’s a 100 percent increase, you can math. You can math and panic simultaneously, go David, king of the gnomes.

Terezi, fickle lady of imbalance, will already be dueling Bro for the right to toss your bouquets. Or garters, you still don’t know what either of you is wearing.

Kanaya, an Afterian clade-of-a-quad or something, and really too much of a classy lady to deserve to get roped into this, has assured you ‘Everything Will Be Ready. You Will Be Quite Fetching. Do Not Worry Davidd.’ This is not as reassuring as she appears to think it is as she has also told you that ‘According To Human Matrimonial Traditions You Must Not View The Raiment, Yourselves In The Raiment, Or Each Other In The Raiment Prior To The Contract Signing Ceremony’. You don’t need Terezi’s nose to know it smells like a setup to you. You google “glowing trolls” and evidently vampires being fashion conscious is a trope on this side of the Gate but you’ve just had a visitation from the real deal.

You contemplate explaining to Aradia what a human shotgun wedding actually is, contemplate the utter conviction you somehow have that she would, option A, decide you ought to knock her up posthaste, or option B, decide she ought to knock you up the rump roast, and you pray to the apple gods again as all others have abandoned you.

You don’t want to show up somewhere smelling like Aradia’s color, you’re already at capacity for being sniffed at judgmentally, Karkat left you a series of something like two dozen texts that maxed out their character limits about not embarrassing anyone next week. You can’t make yourself delete them without reading them, but Karkat is by turns so pessimistic and overly romantic over this whole arranged-marriage-for-the-continuing-stability-of-the-Realms that he’s making you sick to your stomach, a digestion pouch that currently contains: two sips of AJ, a leaden mass of shouty text, possibly some parasitic butterflies, and copious amounts of unused bile. Go home bile there’s nothing for you to digest. Go home carnivorous butterflies, at least one of us should be free.

“I feel that I should remind you that I can hear you,” Aradia states, and a mental nudge that is somehow **_distinctively not you_** sends two amorphous bodies in the dark into closer contact. Dream-Dave recoils because he almost touched Dream-Aradia in the soft plush rumblespheres. Real-Dave is cool as a cucurbit. Real-Dave is so cool he’s frozen like the Tin-man with lockjaw and no lube.

‘Remind’ implies that this was a fact which you previously possessed. This is not true. You object with a very calm, “What?!”. Your shoulders only hunch a little. You don’t remember to object that she’s been calling you ‘Dahvid’ when you are the one and only _Dave_. The sacred vessel of AJ lands on your foot and baptizes you in sticky squandered juice and the smell of shame.

*

Dave is _so cute_ when he’s embarrassed! And you didn’t even have to cheat much to figure out the best buttons to push. Future-You is every bit as awesome as current you, but Future-Dave is already more mellow. You know you’ll have to tone it down soon, humans can only sustain prolonged periods of stress for so long before more permanent damage accrues, but you also know he’s already onto you and you can only fake misinterpretation of human norms for so long before the game gives out.

You will miss this pre-wedding jitters game, but Future-Dave will become a good lover and a reliable partner, not that you ever doubted either, you just need to get some practice in first. After the wedding. Humans are particular about not test-driving the goods which seems impractical considering the supposed sanctity of the marriage state. You’d think they’d want to prevent divorces. Not that that will really be an option once you’re linked. You can add distance, but this is a one-way trip. Oh, and it’s only been six tenths of a second but you should probably answer his question.

“‘ _The apple gods’_ , Dahvid, if you intend to address the _trees_ , you have to do it on a more individual basis, but if you’re addressing the _power_ that makes them bloom and swell, well that would be the _bees_. And Time. So you’re effectively praying to Sollux for an intervention with the greater powers of processes and cycles. And me! Though I thought you wouldn’t be praying to me until our _honeymoon_ , that’s very _sweet_ of you, Dahvid!” You wiggle your brows and project a gentle appreciation at him through his mental conceptualization of the two of you in the dark. Three, two, one, ignition!

*

“So _Sollux_ can hear me?” You’re going to find a hole, get in, and by sheer willpower it shall fill in like a black hole collapsing. You shall take your terrible former crush on Jade, your terrible former crush on John (successive, not simultaneous), and your terrible-not-entirely-dead crush on Karkat (TERRIBLE) to keep you company and/or die as they ought with your crushed body.

Aradia cocks her head like a hunting hound on the scent of something delicious and doomed.

“Actually, now Equius and Nepeta can hear you too. I didn’t actually catch most of that part. But Nepeta agrees, Karkat _does_ have a super cute butt. She’s going to see if she can find a mute button on it when it’s time for our guests to boogie down.

“The connection’s not just _Aspect_ , Dave, it’s existing clade connections and the route of least resistance. And it’s most unruly _now_ between the Banns and the wedding.”

*

Dave shivers and his mouth does a little open-close-open like when Eridan is channeling the Life-Death-Potency-Potential of Earth’s oceans, aka Water(y)-Hope, or sometimes Lethe-Hope-Begin-Again. Of all the things to break him, that was kind of anticlimactic. You jump back in time just far enough to flick a vibration of sound at the inverse wavelength with one hand and wave over alternative dialogue with the other.

This will be so much easier when the two of you are bound. He’ll have access to all of your shared Aspects, Time, Death, Fertility, and Rebirth, waking all the potential that’s still sleeping from SGRUB/SBURB, and you’ll get finer control of them, as well as a pupil and then partner. All that potential, that courage and loyalty and sweet vulnerability you want to lap up, no spoon needed. That solid knowledge of a past partnership he cannot remember. You do not feel this protectiveness and covetousness for Karkat, perhaps the former, but not the latter. You do not feel this for Redglare, nor do you allow yourself to feel it for Latula.

You look forward to when the temporary extreme sensitivity his psyche is exhibiting in the period between Banns and ceremony will dim and toughen up again so that he’ll stop accidently summoning clade or potential matches and you can stop worrying that Caliborn will un-miraculously spontaneously exist or that maybe Damara or The Handmaiden will decide they’d like a hot piece of Dave. Back off bitches, this one’s all yours. Mmmm. There is something compelling about knights that make them irresistible to you. You have a weakness for knights, with their dichotomy of strength and the vulnerability of their personal codes of ethics. You do not constrain yourself quite so tightly, but you can respect and _admire_ those that do.

You can’t wait. Okay you can, but mostly by dint of teasing Dave and speeding up time when you’re not sleeping. All the details are already set, you just need to wait for Rose to start and finish Imbuing the physical contract. It’s not cheating if you get away with it.

“Dave, if you’re worried about consummating our pile, you don’t need to be. The contract is for flush _and_ pale and we’re both going to be so tired from dancing the limbo that I assure you we will be sleeping as snug as grubs in lusii carrier rugs long before we get to any feeling jams or pailing.”

He looks a bit better this time around, exhaling instead of flapping his facegash with that adorkable wibble.

“You know what? I’m standing in a puddle of apple piss and the shattered sensibilities of days gone by, breast heaving like a damsel clutching her just-ripped bodice while the hunky lead tells her ‘close your eyes fair maiden, I shall take care of you and you needn’t trouble your pretty little head after anything’. Nope. Noped to the Nth power, and don’t tell me whose power that is. I’m going to go get a shower and pretend the day just started. Then, if Ms. Surprise-Attack would like to answer some questions, _in good faith_ , as opposed to twisted enough to be effectively _not at all useful_ , that would be something like helpful.”

He glares at you now, even through his sunshield it’s obvious, and his stance firms so that even if he’s not armed, it’s like he’s finally found his ground. Your power provides pre-images of his potential flashstep, a dozen Daves, all vibrating and humming into a single column of this Dave. You let a little more power trickle out, enough to see alternative Future Daves, some only a few weeks out, some years.

You don’t know why the 36 of you trolls (35 now) arrived in (new) Earth’s Afterus awake or quick to at least partially waken while the humans mostly seem to be still growing into it, but he’s going to be _magnificent_. Time and Flame and Rebirth. You want to pull him around you and roll in it, spread the scent of him over you and you over him so no one can interfere and claim innocence. You would destroy them. Unless it was what he wanted. Then you’d step aside and haunt their steps to be sure they didn’t make a false move. Or invite them to join if it was what he wanted. You’re not big on material possessions but you’ve _very_ particular about your people.

“You’re right, Dave. Get your shower and I’ll answer what I can, no more games, at least for now.”

Does he notice that you’ve been using his name?

He looks uncertain for a moment, like he doesn’t know how to take this now that you’ve agreed. You smile, lips carefully sealed so that it’s not a threat and he reflexively smiles back. His teeth are white and not much sharper than your own. It’s clearly not a threat when he does it. He heads for the shower and you watch him.

Hate to see him leave. Love to watch him go.

*

One shower later you’re maybe at least 60 percent ready for confrontation but can’t find Aradia. You make yourself a sandwich because your stomach actually feels up to more than bananas and you’re actually really hungry (and kind of sick of burping bananas). You pour a glass of water and set it all down on the coffee table before turning around to find Aradia in your space.

She reaches up and for once she’s not wearing long sleeves so you can see the twist of her new tattoos, still patched with scabs.  She takes your shades, sets them aside with one hand, the other tracing your ear until it tickles. Her hand returns and she runs both hands over your short hair. Her palms are warm and her nails exert just the right pressure, like scratching an itch before it forms.

She pulls you down into her until your foreheads meet with a soft thunk. Skin protests the sudden pressure from skulls on both sides, but a second later it doesn’t hurt anymore, your brain is still trying to process this strange gentleness, like a commercial break from her usual schedule of gleeful discombobulation, but your gray matter isn’t synchronized swimming inside your skull so go Team Time BonBon. Her eyes are so close they merge, like you’re both Cyclops in a stare-down. You let your hands land in the fairly uncharged area of her shoulders, hold her back.

“I know you’re getting frustrated with not being in control of your situation. It’s rough to have all your stuff gone and people in your business at all hours of the night and day. I should have explained better instead of teasing you. There’s time for that when we’re on more equal ground. What you need to know is this: the wedding pile is a decoy, a reserve of things in which you and I have emotional investment. Right now, in the psychic and mental realms overlaying the more corporeal ones, you smell, really, really good. Of age and still unattached. _Advertising_.”

She inhales, still holding your gaze, forehead still warm against yours and you know she’s _smelling_ you. It’s not as offensive as you thought it might be. She sighs as she exhales, eye(s) fluttering and something in you that is primitive and has no sense of self-preservation is beating its caveman chest.

“Reading the Banns opens the marriage to public protest. So long as there’s enough time between the Banns and the ceremony, no one can challenge that the marriage wasn’t legally preformed: ‘speak now or forever hold your peace’. But reading the Banns leave us both psychically more open, it lets the Intendeds' Aspects get used to one another, or seek out other potential matches. You may have noticed that it has been hard to find alone time. No one wants to leave you to fend for yourself in case someone comes calling and doesn’t want to respect your no. At least half of the existing Time Aspects are already paired and in the Warding. Time is rare. My ancestor and broodmate have no interest in you. If someone comes after one of the two of us, and doesn’t care about consent, they’re more likely to go after you because you have less experience. I’m not aware of any Time Aspects of comparable strength, but that’s the tetchy thing about Time. They don’t have to be _contemporary_ to be a threat.

 “Your brothers, your friends, even and especially me… we’re not babysitting you, Dave. _We’re back up_.”

Your breath catches and you can almost taste in your mind that she means it, the fuzzy amorphous shapes of you in the darkness having a heart-to-heart. It makes you maybe a little flattered and maybe a little scared. What good’s a bit of hapkido against a practiced Time Aspect? Perhaps the hamster in the wheel of your brain would have gotten overwrought shortly thereafter, but Aradia’s super-special-honesty-time is not quite up.

“And Dave? I would never tell you to close your eyes and think of the Realms. That would be an awful waste of nubile young Time virgin. _I’m going to teach you **so many** uses for Time_.”

This is somehow the dirtiest thing anyone has ever said to you.

You laugh, still staring ridiculously into her one merged eye. Somehow, for the first time, you are no longer worried that you won’t be able to hold up your end of Time for any mutual Time shenanigans. Aradia knows what she’s doing. She believes you have the necessary Aspect. You’re going to put yourself into those strong callused hands with their precisely filed claws and petite elegance. If you’re going down, you’re going down with panache.

“Aradia. Babe. Gorgeous ferocious goddess among trolls of all kinds. Why does your breath smell like pastrami on rye with honey mustard and pickles? Did you eat my lunch?”

“I saved you the other half. Sharing food is a shared trust in Afterus too. Unless you want me to break the bread on your head. Mom wants me to assert more dominance, but I think she’s being facetious.”

You pull back until your eyes resolve into pairs again.

“I think that the bread’s already broken enough, but I could use some company if you want to watch me eat the other half of our sandwich.”

She sits on your lap and pulls out the pickles with her psionics, one by one, and feeds them to you. Little Dave doesn’t even have much time to get up to being more than conflicted because you are too busy being attacked by flying pickles. At first you only open your mouth because she makes it obvious that the zoomy picklecrafts will be hitting you in some form, and that’s the easiest way to be sure it doesn’t get crammed somewhere else. You like your ears. They give your shades character and a way to stay on. You like your eardrums pre-pickle-juice irrigation.

By the end of the sandwich, your leg is asleep and your cheeks smells like pickles as much as your shared (in more than one sense) breath does, but you’re also more relaxed than you’ve been in a while. The boogieman isn’t Aradia, it’s expectations, and your fear of failure or that you’ll regret missed opportunities elsewhere. She’s made it clear she’ll have your back, before and after, so the rest of it can wait, you’ll just have to take this one day at a time.

*

The flash of Dave’s throat is beguiling. How much of himself he gives to you is his own (this kiss will always be the first, even if one should happen earlier now), but anyone who tries to take from him, you’ll see that they regret it, not that they’ll have much (objective) Time to do so.

*

You are the one and only Dave Strider and over the next week you have strange dreams. This is nothing new. Until it is.

*

It takes hours to push your way up the mountain, and that’s only because you push yourself. Past the patches of paw paws where Ambrose-but-always-‘Bro’ once started to carve out more space for an orchard then relented and let the forest reclaim it. Past rhododendrons and mountain laurel, all long past blooming, past a dead tree where you know a raccoon mama lived last summer, and might still, through an endless sea of weeds and underbrush. Sometimes you cross the streams and sometimes you climb up them where the forest is almost impenetrable otherwise. You wouldn’t want to make the trip in the dark, but you’ve made the trip so many times over the years that, so long as there’s light, you could close your eyes, spin in place, and know exactly which way to turn when you stopped.

You remember making this trip with Bro’s body, the weight of it tied to a bundle of saplings cut for the purpose, the sound of their tips dragging, the meat of the body, the grief its own weight, denial and shock your only allies. Whatever his differences with everyone else within traveling distance, however they felt about you with your demon eyes, and him with his heretical pacifistic pagan nonsense, this is the one thing with which they would have helped you and the one thing you had to do alone.

The house, your house now, lies below in the valley, surrounded by hard won fields of corn, squash, beans, and fruit trees, all carved out of a land where the forests wax and wane with the flooding. You’ve never actually seen a bad flood, just the creeks churning so that you avoided crossing and didn’t dare drink, but Bro warned you, gave you long lists of schooling, practical and otherwise, all straight from his soft voice to your mind, just as fast as you could swallow it. You know all about things you don’t dare discuss with anyone else. Darwin and Roger Williams and Joan D’Arc. That there is more than one religious tradition and not all of them are texts. That The Flood happens in many of them.

That’s why you bury your dead on the mountain, where it’s too high for the flood waters to ever reach. The valleys would be oceans before Bro’s bones, once the temple timbers of so much more, sail away. You clear the last ridge and then the last of the forest. The top of the mountain has more wind but the cemetery, clear of trees, sits in a circle of sunlight, surrounded by apple trees.

You walk a circuit around the inside of the apple trees and between the graves, some so old the words in the wood are indecipherable, or the stones still set but the names forgotten. Besides Bro’s grave is a smaller grave, the one he kept the most carefully. This was Dirk, your middle brother, and you don’t remember him any more than you remember your shared doomed parents.

You inspect for changes from last week and you let your bag down carefully, mindful of the blade, the bottle, and the precious strung box inside. The grass and weedy flowers and whatnot are almost to your knees now and while you’ve ignored it for a few weeks, had curled up over Bro’s grave cushioned by it, and spent your Sunday napping in the sun, this week you cut the grass in smooth swings of your sickle, broken by breaks to stretch your back and neck and switch hands.  You clear all the graves but Bro’s, some marked with stone like his, some just wood, and you finish and wipe your brow. You lay out a few of the cut flowers on Dirk’s grave. Maybe he would have preferred something else, but this is what you have.

It’s September and in the valley below the first of your apples are ready, all spitters so far, but the air is still warm. On the mountain, there’s a different type of apple, and a few are ready enough for lunch.

Maybe you should be bringing the dead food instead of taking what’s here, but you didn’t bring anything but your sickle and your zither and a bit of applejack. Bro planted these trees so the two of you, once more of you, could picnic in the company of long gone family. You don’t remember your parents, or your other siblings, or your grandparents, or your aunts and uncles. The fire took the last of them when you were still toddling and only you and Bro were left. Among the furthest fields, in the valley with its good soil and sun, some distant relative had started an apple orchard, all from seed, almost all sour spitters. Among the hundreds of seeds-become-trees was one that produced apples fit for more than just cider and it was that tree that your brother grafted into dozens upon dozens of others. You have to know which trees are which in the valley, but up here, he only planted grafts. Up here, it’s apple heaven.

You have no talent for grafting. Once these trees die, there will be nothing left of Bro but you, and if you have anything to do with it, you’ll be long gone before they are, however long you live.

You braid the grass on Bro’s grave into rows, tuck bits of flowers in and tip a bit of the bottle of applejack over the stone, then a bit over Dirk’s because what the heck, maybe wherever he is he can enjoy it. You plug the bottle again and stow it in your bag. You crumble a shred of tobacco over Bro’s stone, and the scent makes you feel briefly comforted. You sit back against the stone with an almost ripe apple and Douce-Douce in your lap. You crunch your way through the almost-sweetness and lean back to tune Bro’s zither. All that he had is yours now, shirts and shoes and this responsibility to your dead. Was it easier or harder to shoulder this with a child in tow? You can’t really imagine it, you just feel empty.

You pluck your way through a bit of this and that, hands strangely pale and freckled, the little hairs ginger. (Why is that strange?) Alone on the mountain top, where God may be watching, but those that judge are not, you sing “Amazing Grace” not because you believe it, though you’re not sure you don’t, but because Whoever, _Whatever_ is watching, there’s something right in the tones and rush of air through your lungs and throat, the wholehearted devotion you have to give it to not drop it. There’s no one left to accompany you. If you were to lay down here and not get up, there’s no one to miss you.

The last of the song fades from your throat and fingers and for a moment you don’t feel empty. For a moment you simply _are_ and it is enough. Uncountable time passes and a shadow falls across your face. You open your eyes with less of a jerk to your shoulders than the surprise of it should instill, some of the serenity lingering.

It’s now that you know that this is a dream, because Aradia stands over you, eyes a shade darker than Dream-Dave’s, horns golden and not candy corn, glowing a soft, almost sunlit gold, an aura of light. She has wings of light, and they shift, now that of a dragonfly, now that of a bat, now the four feathered wings of cherubim. Dream-Dave’s eyes widen and fairy-Aradia steps back until he-you are no longer shadowed under her, the formidable tower of her presence revealed to be no taller than you-him.

“Wilt thou offererst of thine fruit?” Dream-Aradia’s voice is higher than your-Aradia. Still resonant, but eerily so.

She steps backward until she reaches the ring of apple trees and you-he find yourself stepping after her.

She touches a tree and the fruit swells, ripens. It’s obscene and amazing and Dream-Dave wants to hit her and clasp her like adults do and can’t decide which is the stronger urge. Real-you has never felt pitch before. Anger yes, frustration yes, but never so-mad-you-want-to-frick. For all that Dream-Dave is a virginal hillbilly in existential crisis he’s a kinky fucker. His-your hands tighten to fists. You idly wonder where Douce-Douce went.

Dream-Aradia waits, watches the brewing storm of anger. Dream-Dave considers this place more holy than any church and he also knows that Bro sometimes came down the mountain with little bruises peppering his neck like overlarge freckles. Real-you wonders if this is Ambrose-Bro’s secret lover.

She pulls an apple from the tree with a twist of her wrist, bites into it. You watch her chew and she watches you watch her. When she swallows you watch the working of her throat and she reaches her arm out to you and offers the fruit, the bite mark a flash of white under the golden russet of the skin. He-you doesn’t take it.

“‘Some have entertained angels unaware.’” Is it an offer or a warning?

“‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.’” Dream-Dave is certain that the more he wants something, the more evil it must be. He’s a sad little puppy, and that’s coming from Real-Dave, Prince of Confusion.

“That’s Shakespeare, Dah-veed. Will you claim that for your Scripture as well? Wilt thou call me ‘a goodly apple rotten at the heart’?” If the first part is chiding, the second is sad. Is Dream-Aradia alone too?

Her arm is still outstretched and steady. She waits patiently for Dream-Dave to find his cojones. The apple doesn’t tremble until he-you reach out, take it, bite over her mark.

The apple is sweet, the juice somehow the most delicious thing you have every experienced, like the trickle of juice is somehow equivalent to that moment of transcendence when his-your fingers and throat and being are in accord up here with Douce-Douce. Like when you’re spinning and you hit your groove. There’s a hint of spice to the bite as you chew and you-he wonder if it’s the apple or Aradia.

You swallow and your mind seizes and the apple drops and then you drop. The second to last thing Dream-Dave feels is Dream-Aradia catch him. The last thing is a kiss to your shared forehead, and then Dream-Dave is dreaming.

In the dream within a dream he-you watch dams be built and mountains be leveled and cemeteries be driven off the top of the world by great yellow machines (bulldozers you-you tells him-you), the flash of stone and bone and centuries tumble past until all that’s left is a swath of brown dirt. The streams run brown and in the valleys the houses and roads change.

Somewhere, _somewhen,_ there’s a river on fire.

There’s an endless mass of meteors screaming through the sky.

There’s a scream so loud the universe shatters and planets scatter.

There’s a mushroom cloud in the desert, over an atoll, _in a city_. (Oh God. Oh gods. _Whoever_. Whoever _can_ do something _should_. Make this madness **_STOP_**. For a moment it freezes, the roiling lift and whoosh stops, still looming like an avenging angel of doom over the city, indiscernible skyline the mere topography of a crushed anthill. ‘Stop’ isn’t enough. You want it never to have happened. Something resumes and the city is no longer in your sights.)

In the dream within a dream you watch a death march of people out of the mountains, his-your mountains, across hundreds of miles, watch thousands of people die. Starvation. Exposure. Disease. Bullets. Death camps. Now both Dream-Dave and you are trying to escape from the dream, desperate.

You gather yourself, yourselves, and fight until you break free.

You surface from the dream to another, and for a moment you’re back on the mountain top, and Ambose-Bro is there and everything is more right than it has been. He-you watch Bro put toddler-him-you down in the grass and beckon to a tall dark figure at the edge of the younger trees. The figure nods but doesn’t move for a moment and as soon as the motion stops, it’s like you lose track of him. When he walks closer you see that he’s wearing an old-fashioned shirt and trousers like Ambrose-Bro and Dream-Dave, rifle slung over his shoulder.

He’s dark, darker than Ambrose’s heavy tan, darker than real-you-Dave, an almost matte black highlighted only where the sun hits him. His eyes are a surprising blue. His hair is long, braided down his back, and when he stops the tip of it is visible to toddler-him-you, who tries to catch it. For all that the stranger appears initially as jovial as a rock, he flicks his braid just enough to make toddler-him-you jump like a kitten at it. He has horns, tiny ones, wide and rounded like they were ground down. His glow is so dark that it’s more of a shadow.

“ _Hephaestian_ ,” rumbles out Ambrose-Bro with a distinctly we’re-gonna-get-jiggy-with-it depth. Real-you is backing up like a dump truck, beep-beep-beep, time to blow this popsicle stand.

“ _Ambrose_ ,” Hephaestian returns, just as deep, as they lean into each other with an oblivious toddler at their feet.

Dream-Dave is intrigued. Dream-Dave is also unaware of what hickeys are. You nope this and haul the both of you away with the twist and winding for leverage and then the straight pull that you learned from watching a genocide. You leave toddler him-Dave to his blissful ignorance, clearly he didn’t end up traumatized by _this_ at least.

You lose Dream-Dave somewhere in this transition and wake up, still asleep, in a metal corridor with a douchy orange sorta-you, separate bodies this time. You hope that wherever, whenever Ye-Olde-Hill-Billy-Dave ended up, he’s okay.

“This is getting real old, bro,” Creamsicle-you drawls. He sounds Texan. He has a ruff of feathers, wings, and no legs, just a tail. The tail flicks like an annoyed cat, creeps like an amorous octopus, and behind your shades you watch it without turning your head.

“You’re telling me, bro, I’m just trying to get out of here. Wherever here is. Help a bro out?”

“Sure thing, _Real-Dave_.” He dumps you out an airlock and you wake up when you suffocate. If your usual freaky dreams are to be believed it’s a sucky way to go, but still not the worst you can “remember”. Your mouth tastes like fairy-apples and death.

Karkat is shaking your shoulder and screaming like a drill sergeant.

“DAVE DOUCHEMUFFIN STRIDER, GET YOUR _GLUTES_ OUT OF BED AND INTO THE SHOWER BEFORE  SO HELP ME GOD I _SHOVE_ YOU IN _CLOTHED_. WE HAVE _TWO HOURS_ TO GET TO THE CEREMONY AND YOU SMELL LIKE A DEAD BIRD, ONE THAT’S BEEN ROASTING FOR SEVERAL WEEKS IN FAIRER CLIMES THAN OUR OWN MISBEGOTTEN, CHILBLAIN-BLIGHTED _SNOW-SHIT_.”

“I’m awake.” You scrub at your eyes, run your hands over your head and indulge in a full body shiver as you try to jumpstart your brain. Karkat reverts to indoor mode and drops the covers on your feet.

“Oh. Good. Because I’m not going to enact the final scene of ‘In which an attractive troll of high socio-economic class falls asleep in a series of increasingly unbelievable ways until their one-true-love cures them of narcolepsy in a touching display of Life finesse’. Horn-fondler.”

Ah, the fond naming conventions of the Karkattius Vantassimus. You’re totally his favorite.

Yesterday when you gave blood for the contract (way more than you really think is necessary, but who are you to object, you’re just the contractually obligated bridegroom/apprentice) he was all over you with bottled AJ and advice. You might possibly have made aspersions as to how flagrantly slutty he was, paling it up in front of your intended pale-flush bride. Karkat insists that chucking the bottle of AJ at you proves he’s not being pale at you, as if Aradia might have taken offense. She was laughing hard enough that you very much doubt _offense_ is what she was getting out of it. People Aradia apparently enjoys seeing off balance: you, Karkat, everyone else.

Karkat manages you into the bathroom with a last squinty glare to be sure you’re actually about to strip and get in the shower and not just stare dazedly at the foggy mirror. You scrub up as fast as you can because it’s clear that Dirk has already showered. The water never hits lukewarm. Brrr. Asshole.

You don’t have to wear bandages over the tattoos any more, but you still have scabs that sort of soften and get a little sticky. Gross. Fascinating. Going to make you late. You scrub yourself dry and pat your arms until it’s safe to get dressed. Points to Dave Strider for super short hair, Dirk uses a ridiculous amount of product and would be late. Why the hell did they leave you here sleeping in ‘til noon on _today_ of all days? You bet they’re already at the ceremony building in Afterus.  

You let your best-troll shove you in a white shirt, a red clip-on tie with a yellow parakeet on it, and a red suit. Doesn’t he know Valentine’s is over and candy canes are at 90 percent off? You don’t make leprechaun jokes. You don’t make Tweety bird jokes. You don’t actually want to wear green and the suit fits better than anything else you’ve ever worn and you’re no longer worried someone’s going go rooting under your skirts for the festive embarrassment-by-garter. Not quite as comfy as sweats, but miles better than rented promwear or any of Dirk’s pants and shirts. The suit has clever gussets in it so that you can actually _move_. If it comes with an in-joke no one’s explained to you, you’re Birdzilla, you’ll role with the punches and come back tweeting.

It’s a good thing Karkat’s driving because the trip to and through the Gate to Afterus goes in a sort of daze, as does the ceremony. Aradia is in a sleeveless burgundy dress, belted in white with a red cord, her whip coiled at her hip as always. She’s pretty, sparkling eyes, great arms, the black tattoo ink standing out more clearly on her gray forearms than on your own. The dress is probably pretty, you can’t remember anything else about it. John is probably snickering somewhere over your marriage dynamic because the only thing you’ve got that could be considered a weapon is the bouquet and the watch, maybe you if you’re being generous. Your bride is a psionic, it probably doesn’t count. You should have insisted on a ceremonial shitty sword.

The marriage cup isn’t from an animal, it’s _the top of some troll’s skull_ , long spiraled horns included. You feel like you should be disgusted or object, but you’re too busy riding the current of whatever is carrying you along. Terezi takes a sip, then Aradia, who passes it to you. You brace yourself for whatever’s in there and take a small sip, let it go down. It tastes like unsweetened iced tea. You pass the cup to Bro and turn back to Aradia. She winks.

Should you be upset that she wound you up or relieved that she tea-totaled this for you? You wonder from whose skullcap you just took a nightcap. Arm length horns. That would probably be memorable, you’ll have to try Troglodyte, the Afterian version of Google. Troglodyte usually only works on the Afterus side of the Gates, unless you’ve got a pricy converter or a hacker friend. When you really need to use it you can usually sponge off of Karkat, though that won’t really be an option now. Of course, your hexPhone should pick it up here...

You wonder if this is a defeated enemy or a beloved clade member.Or beloathed.

 _(OMFG you just drank out of someone’s **skull**._ (Why is that worse than all the animal bones you’ve fondled?)  Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, _look shiny things_!)

Bro and Terezi have a brief exhibition fight which ends when she slashes him across the breast pocket and his suit goes rip-clang instead of rip-flesh-wound. You can’t believe that it was anything but rigged, there’s not nearly enough property damage, but if no one’s screaming for a do-over, it’s all good.

Bro toasts her with the flask and shares it with her. Your memories of Billy-Dave supply the name of the scent to be applejack. That is of course ridiculous because Billy-Dave and exoticized winged-Aradia are all an embarrassing figment of your anxious imagination. You do not know what applejack smells like.

Bro does not ordinarily sport a flask. He probably thinks it’s necessary to formalwear or something. He’s kind of ridiculous, not that you’d ever tell him, it might hurt his feelings. Even if there have been years when all you wanted was to get a reaction from him.

You feel a swelling of love or some other gushy awkward feeling for Bro and for Dirk, maybe even for Terezi and all her pointy bits. You’re so glad that they’re alive, even if they drive you crazy. You’re going to sort of miss them when you’re off being awesome with Aradia in Afterus and elsewhere. Well, maybe Terezi or Bro will visit.

Karkat takes your jacket and helps you roll up your sleeves so that they stay. You sign the contract. Aradia signs the contract. Karkat and Aradia’s best-troll, Tavros, sign as witnesses. The Sheep-in-law doesn’t sign anything, she just sort of hangs out with Tavros and chews her cud or something. You don’t know. She’s unexpectedly quiet and not even threatening anyone. Maybe someone drugged her? Is that were the original skull-brew went? Do Sheep-in-laws dream of electric fences?

You don’t exchange rings, but the presiding Mage, who looks like Nepeta on steroids with the advantage of a few decades, puts her hands over your crossed arms until the tattoos light up. Eerie. Briefly, you itch all over, especially there, but the itch fades within a few seconds and your arms, previously still a bit scabby, are healed, the black lines crisp, matching Aradia’s closely, if not exactly. The Mage lifts your arms and turns you to face your combined family-clade-frenemies.

_There is someone else in your head._

There’s a cheer, and you find yourself moving along a sea of bodies out and down a hall. It’s not crowd surfing and it’s not levitation. You just sort of find yourself carried along by the current. Disassociation is usually not a good thing, but you’re not screaming “Holy Shit!” so it has its benefits. Are you shocky or is Aradia doing something?

Your mental figure in the dark envisions a shoulder bump and you feel a shoulder bump back in the real world, Aradia’s hand locked in yours. You look down at her and if she can see the whites of your eyes behind your shades she doesn’t point it out. There’s a sensation like a blanket over the figure in your mind. Not smothering, just warm. She squeezes your hand and shoulder bumps you again.

You find yourself at the base of the wedding pile. It’s massive and you can’t recognize all of it, though someone took all your graphic tees and folded them graphic side out so that they make a neat ribbon around the bottom and there’s another ribbon just above it that must be Aradia’s tees, featuring a lot of geology and nerd jokes. Whoever built the pile, they probably had to rent the room two weeks ago to start constructing it. There are tiers and a lot of it is more shelving than the random tangle that a pile implies, though it's well padded with comforters, sheets, towels and a few other soft things with the tags still showing. Your jar of kitten fetuses is hanging out under the first step, where it’s most stable, in a crowd of likeminded jars, not all of which you recognize. Someone’s plugged your laptop in and it’s running a cycling slideshow of combined baby pictures framed by your jar collection. Grub, chub, wiggler, toddler. Someone thinks they’re being cute.

Hands still locked together, Aradia extends you a sort of mental question, something like _up/yes? my strength/responsibility/you are not alarmed? (Trust)_. Yeah, like you’re going to admit anything. You briefly think about trying to scale the pile yourself, hopefully in a mental place she can’t see, and then you just surrender to whatever the plan is.

You find yourself shortly thereafter ensconced in a hollow about three-quarters of the way up with your Bridezilla. You squish a fold into a comforter you don’t recognize and wedge your bouquet of spiky things into place so that you don’t hit yourself or accidently bomb someone with Afterian death nettles or whatever they are. John did indeed line your side with whoopee cushions and a toaster. There is a smuppet digging into your spine.

You toss the gags back down the mountain of stuff, shove the smuppet further into whatever tiny den of iniquity it inhabits and rest your arm on a toaster armrest. The box has a recipe on it for “mangrit waffles”. The handwriting is clearly Mr. Egbert’s best teacher-script.

Mr. Egbert, and his twin, Mr. Crocker, are very DILF. And _twins_. It’s a good thing you got over that in an entirely mature manner several years ago when the puberty bunny’s various minions brought you feelings about more age appropriate fixations and Bro made observations about The John Dad (Percival-but-please-Percy-is-quite-sufficient) and The Jane Dad (Phineas-Robert-but-Bob-is-quite-sufficient) regarding their asses, biceps, smiles, and oral fixations. This put them very firmly in the shoebox labeled “Hell No”. You are one part grateful and one part still traumatized. Being Dave is very complicated.

Puberty sucked. Puberty under Bro’s roof was like another level of hell. You are so glad that you are all grown up and mature and making excessively hurried lifelong commitments instead. (You are still more shell-shocked than standard-Dave. Press two for standard-Dave. Sorry suckers, out of service.)

Aradia, mostly mentally withdrawn so that you could point her out in a dark room, but can’t guess what she’s thinking, Aradia seats her butt on your much missed bed pillow, wiggles in place and leans in to tell you, lips to ear, that she’s _not wearing any underwear_. Your mouth drops open just as there’s a flash of light from the twiggy four horned troll at the bottom of the pile. He snickers at you, gives Aradia a thumbs up, and tucks the camera back down with a promise to go drum up some gossip fodder.

Aradia blows him a kiss and shares a brush of her feelings for Sollux with you: _mutual-mischief/worry/take-no-prisoners protectiveness(burn-down-the-moon-this-is-mine(ours-now?))_. She follows this with: _does-it-bother you?/no-threat/could-use-help/this-is-precious-must-be-protected-yes?_ The curl of her question is not precisely that of the punctuation, but the flick of hunting cat’s tail, the Cheshire cat’s smile, a curved blade, but also friendly. It feels like she’s saying, ‘come hunt with me’. How could you turn down an offer like that? When in Rome and all that. Time to participate in some debaucheries with the locals.

This is your second in person meeting with Sollux Captor. You love and loathe him already.

You push back what you hope is a sense of _shit-why-not/yeah-he’s-cute/let’s-make-some-trouble_ and try to pass her a query: _(If)-Karkat-and-Sollux-frenemies-pitch-puppies-at-play/She-sheep-in-law-to-Aradia/Bro-to-Dave/Aradia-Dave-Team-Time-Bomb-to-Sollux/protective-yes? (Then)- Aradia-Dave-Team-Time-Bomb-in-law-to-Karkat-and-thence-Kankri…So-many-awkward-family/clade-dinners/feasts- our-innate-right-and-duty._

You’re not sure any of it comes through clearly except that you’re not really used to thinking in quadrants, your cultural expectations not placing the boundaries in the same places, but she laughs, aloud and in the shared space inside, and you haven’t yet had a stroke or panic attack over someone else in your mind, so this might yet work.

Guests come to the bottom of the pile in ones and twos and threes and leave boxes or envelopes or sometimes just make promises. Equius is solemn when he nods to you both and vows, “My expertise and assistance are at your disposal, Gate Warders, _whenever_ you should need them”. You can hear him pronounce the capitals, and even past the music you can hear the under-rumble of his Afterian emphasis. Aradia accepts as you nod back and Equius bows, solemnly, and takes his leave, midnight blue suit still sharply pressed, his excessively formal manners at home for once in his outfit.

He’s wearing a rust and red tie, very diplomatic. His collar is just slightly out of place on one side and the tie just off-center enough that you can see that he’s wearing an actual tie, not just a clip-on like you and probably everyone else. Either he’s very confident that no one intends him harm that he can’t deal with successfully, or he’s advertising proclivities you don’t want to think about. Or maybe he just couldn’t find a satisfactory clip-on. Let’s go with that and resume quasi-normal assumptions about one another.

You _don’t_ want to think about what gives Equius the jollies any more than you want to know Dirk’s hot buttons or you want to think about how Equius is very well-built and you might be developing a kink for Afterian-accented English.

Regarding his offer, you don’t know when you might need a robot or whatever he’s gotten/will get up to subsequent to making strifebots in the basement with Dirk, but the particular inflection of ‘whenever’ reminds you that bluebloods can live a very long time. You might not live so long, but if you’re traveling forward, he’s promised to always leave his door open to you should you need aid. That. That is no small thing to make such a commitment. You don’t doubt that he has every intention to keep it. You can be irrationally fond of someone and still only want to deal with them through yes/no questions. That’s basically your relationship with Dirk. At least Equius will tell you what terrible offense you’ve committed when the inevitable conflict arises. Dirk is far more passive aggressive.

From your lofty perch on a pile of stuff, your guests are not in black and white and there is a dance floor at your feet, but no giant chessboard. You are mildly disappointed that you won’t be able to watch them flail at each other. People are mostly wearing a bit of red or rust in accordance to if they’re Team Bridezilla or Team Birdzilla. Ties. Corsages. Sashes. There is no limbo. Boo.

Terezi’s wearing a rust suit with a white shirt and a red tie and Bro’s in a red suit with a white shirt and a rust tie. They’re both still carrying their now sheathed swords and obviously having fun swaggering like territorial pimps. Bro has acquired a top hat with fur trim from somewhere. Terezi has taken off her jacket and looks dapper and dangerous in the rust vest and still crisp white shirt. When she laughs, her bear trap mouth displays the usual charming amount of armament. You look elsewhere before Dave Jr. can display his usual awesome lack of social awareness.

Tavros is in rust and white suit robe which probably has a formal name but shit if you know what it is. You don’t know him very well yet, so that’s to be expected. You are very smug that Karkat is only wearing red and white because it wouldn’t have been entirely unreasonable for him to diplomatically wear Aradia’s color too. Most of the guests are wearing less flamboyant displays of your colors. The seadwellers, all four of them, look hilariously terrible in fuchsia and maroon or violet and maroon.

Rose’s crocheted penguins, now revealed to be table decorations and not merely a strange tangential hobby, wear little red and rust knit sweaters and are grouped in twos on the tables, except for the two tables with threesomes.  John is traveling from table to table rearranging them into obscene tableaux. Or as obscene as you can get with plushies that are basically potatoes in sweaters. If John ever gets hitched you will repay in him smuppets. Bouquets of smuppets. Corsages of smuppets. Cans of spring-propelled smuppets. A fucking smuppet cannon.

There’s a troll with Tavros’s horns who waits until John is rearranging the penguins on his table to lean in and tell him something, and whatever it was, it had to be a doozy because you can still see both of his hands on the table but John jumps and you can see him blush from here. Sollux pops up and snaps a pic, then ninjas away again. Score. Public humiliation for all.

You push a mental picture of it at Aradia and you don’t know how it comes through on her end, but she pushes back a picture of The John Dad (Percy) on the dance floor with Super-Buff-Mage-of-Heart-Probably-Nepeta’s-Progenitor. You turn to get a better view. They’re really boogying, some sort of swing-jazz that’s not your usual. Whoa-hot is duking it out with eww-parents. Hot wins out because they’re both really smoking and John’s just noticed so _he_ can shoulder the embarrassment.

Karkat comes by with two plates of food and two bottles of name brand AJ and Aradia zooms them up. Then she zooms him up. Karkat squawks, Sollux is somehow there like a paparazzi fairy to catch his flailing and face-plant in Aradia’s lap, and it’s a different camera this time. You dearly hope that that was on video.

Karkat promises you both “to tell you when you’re being idiots”, and that’s Karkat-speak for “Dude, I love you guys _so_ much.” You both accept this in the manner it’s intended. You even give him a little festive wedding noogie. Knuckle, knuckle, oops, hornbed. He flails and slaps at you but his eyes are soft as he threatens you.

When he straightens up you leave your hand on his left shoulder and Aradia rests her hands on his right. He doesn’t make promises to be there for you or to grubsit or whatever. He’s Class 12 and hasn’t started college yet. He really won’t know what his career or assignment will be until he finds it, is assigned it, or finds a powerful patron.

Aradia sets him back down at the base of the pile carefully and she pushes you a sense of _tenderness-if-this-is-yours-to-protect-it-is-mine-as-well-but-I-would-do-it-anyhow/(precious)._ The two of you mentally squee at each other over winding Karkat up and helping him wind down. She sends you a query: _Sollux-and-Dave=Aradia’s-pale, Karkat-and-Aradia=Dave’s-pale. pale-harem!-must-collect-them-all-yes?_. You snicker back and you’re not sure if it’s aloud. 

She pushes you a query, _Tavros-is-wild-and-free-and-majestic-but-perhaps-we-can-tame-to-our-hand?_ This is accompanied by a sense of windblown hair and romance novel covers and is _mostly_ a joke. You respond with a _don’t-bite-off-more-than-you-can-chew/consolidate-ourselves-first_ instead of an _Ack-I-don’t-even- know-him_, because you can’t really honestly say you don’t know him when you can feel how she feels about him, which includes such details as knowing he’s secretly a badass Neville Longbottom Huffledor. You are already irrationally charmed. Also, you refuse to lose this game of chicken, at least if that’s what you’re playing. She shoulder bumps you and you don’t need the freaky mind-meld to know that’s approval.

The two of you snatch a few bites in between guests. You didn’t realize how hungry you were until the food hits your tongue. Karkat, saving your bacon all the time. Mmm, bacon. And eggs, waffles, and real maple syrup, along with some sort of mash of buttery seasoned greens hanging out by the eggs, safely away from your waffle. Someone, you have no clue who because it certainly wasn’t you or something Aradia ambushed you to ‘discuss’, decided to serve breakfast for this afternoon shindig. You approve. The pile is very obviously on display, you’re on display, but you also have a great view of almost the entire room. You approve of that too. The entertainment’s great.

Rose’s mom, Aunt Anne, and Kankri are sitting at a table in a corner chatting. This goes on for a while until you look back at their table and they’re not there. You find them on the dance floor and for all that he does a very convincing masquerade as a stuffed shirt, Kankri can really bust a move. Aunt Anne can too, but that’s not a surprise. Dirk, still hiding behind the DJ table to avoid the contaminating contact of other sentient lifeforms, cues up something slower and a little swoopy and Kankri even dips her. She dips him back. You kind of love your family. Not just the way you’re obligated to love them, but just how weird and silly they are.

Aunt Anne never wears pastels if she can wear fluorescents. Today she’s in a calf length dress striped in red, rust, day-glow pink and chocolate brown. She has a cotton candy maker instead of a wet bar and makes huge lopsided soft pretzels in dirty shapes and never minded all the mess you could manage, glitter and glue to kitchen experimentation to your first forays into taxidermy. Kankri, all business suits and sweaters, always had such strict rules about manners, (‘ _This is about respecting others and yourself, Dave’_), but _always_ fed you and asked about your day when you came over. He escorted you home until you were in _high school_. In some ways, he was the stable conventional parent to Bro’s fierce campaign of self-sufficiency. Not that you’d ever tell him that. Maybe in a decade or two or if you ever get saddled with spawn happy-hour-confession-time might be a go, but you’re not _that_ far into the twilight zone.

Aunt Anne gave you a check with three zeros and a box of fresh pretzels. Very fresh pretzels, many of whom would have liked a bit of privacy. Aradia samples one and tucks the box into the pile, just bites off Mr. Pretzel’s head while he’s getting jiggy with the Missus or the Mister. She offers you some and hey why not? You grab bottom pretzel’s head and torso. Aunt Anne always knows the perfect amount of salt. It goes great with the syrup on your plate.

Kankri didn’t give you linens or a check, but a promise that he foresaw nothing that you could not overcome. You’re getting maudlin because you believe it and find it a better gift than anything else.

A woman who looks like an older Aradia comes to the bottom of the pile and greets you both with a horn toss and crossed arms, somehow conveying condescension without bothering to introduce herself. This is followed by a rapid fire speech/accusation/benediction in a form of Afterian that you’ve never heard, not that you could parse much even if it was Standard.

You glance at Aradia and her face never changes, still pleasant, but you can _feel_ her anger and her suppression of it. Another stranger, tall, in teals, red, _and_ rust, sporting horns _and_ a swagger like Terezi, comes up behind Aggressive Lady and nods to you both before asking Aggressive something. Aggressive glares, Not-Terezi shrugs a classic “who, me?” and the two of them wink out as if they never were.

Through Aradia you can feel the time manipulation, clearly from Aggressive, but supported by not-Terezi in a way you can’t pinpoint. Still, it’s the first time you’ve had _any_ hint of actually being a Time Aspect, you’re more boggled that you noticed _anything_ than concerned about details.

As you pull yourself together, Aradia hands you a thin red pole and it’s heavier than it looks, heavy in a very promising way. You take it, roll it over in your hands. It’s arm length and with an entirely unwarranted sense of excitement you twist it in opposing directions and reveal the blade. Cane sword. _Sweet_. Hella illegal in New York state, just a typical precaution in the Afterian outdoors.

“It is from the Judicatrice,” your bride informs you. “In recognition of certain similarities between your persons, but also likely a recognition that Damara Megido is incapable of wishing anyone well without a backhanded insult to the compliment. I do not envy the Judicatrice her marriage, but they both chose it.” She smiles at you with a twist to her lips that perfectly matches her sense of exasperation and amused “I-wash-my-hands-of-it”.

You understand exactly. You’d defend your brothers up to and including your death, but you pity whatever poor soul might marry one. Your sister-in-laws fit just fine with the rest of the weirdoes in your family tree, but that just makes it fairer considering Aradia’s now related to them too.

After that it seems to be open season on the wedding pile because sooner or later you see just about everyone at the reception, and you try to pay attention to names and horns and faces and how Aradia reacts. Score one for the hellacious heap, at least you don’t have to stand in a receiving line. A fuchsia troll who looks about your age comes by and chats for a few minutes, gifts an envelope to Aradia “on bee-half of myshellf and my sprat-sister, since Meenah won’t bee able to say as much without a barb. She thought she could skate by tossing some mola at you but fin-ally agreed that this is more appropriate.” Aradia pops the envelope open, peeks in and hides it away again before you can get a glance at it. You try to see if you can sense anything from her but all you can feel is her amusement at your attempt.

Nepeta stops by with her own envelope, decorated all over with hearts and diamonds and stars. Inside is a homemade certificate for one Afterian hunt after a mutually agreed upon land animal. You’ve cleaned plenty of roadkill messes and helped Nepeta with preserving a few of her kills, the biggest things you’ve ever worked on, but you’ve never actually _hunted_ anything yourself. You shouldn’t be as excited as you are, but what people forget about Nepeta because she’s small, cute, talks in the third person and makes cat puns, is that she makes more over the school breaks leading Afterian safaris then the rest of you schmucks manage with part-time jobs year round. There are plenty of dangerous Afterians, but not everyone can _track_. Nepeta bounces off while you’re still trying to think of a way to say “thanks” that is both sincere and not embarrassing.

You catch Jake dancing with a troll gal with upright horns tipped in a crescent and a hook and _very_ grabby hands and Sollux catches them too, but it doesn’t dissuade them in the least. The girl looks younger than you and Jake is older than Dirk. You’re not sure if that counts a cradle robbing or if it’s more she’s commandeered the cradle and has shanghaied him along. Interestingly, she’s wearing a short dark blue sparkly dress with a red sash and red shoes, not a touch of burgundy. Red would imply she’s here on your side of things but you’ve never seen her before.

When she comes to the base of the pile, you learn her name is Vriska and her aspect is Light just like your sister’s, but her proclivities are more toward the gambling side. Vriska is the deliberately uninvited guest to ward off bad luck. She doesn’t get an official invite, but someone personally had to negotiate for her to be there “uninvited” like a strangely sympathetic Maleficent at little Princess Aurora’s christening. This is supposed to ward off worse influences. Vriska propositions you and Aradia insults her and Vriska flounces off to Jake again. Her dress has a butt bow with the tips longer than the skirt. Unreal. The whole interaction feels a like being on stage where everyone knows the script but you. That is, it fits in quite well with the past three months.

Grandma Harley has boogied down a succession of younger people who have since retreated to pant in the relative safety of their chairs. She’s currently dancing in a little knot with Jade, Jane, Nepeta, Terezi, Karkat, Roxy, and the Sheep-in-law. They’ve got a sort of stomp routine going and some impressive synchronization. You can feel sympathetic reverberations when they all hit at the same time.

There’s maybe seventy plus people here, you don’t recognize all of them, though _someone_ must have thought them all trustworthy considering that the identities of Gate Warders are never publicized and all it would take is one stupid social media posting to negate that. You also have no clue who owns all these kids playing hide and seek under the tables or darting up to touch the base of the pile. If they can touch the pile without one of you pointing and snapping back to their starting place, you’re supposed to toss them a piece of candy like an immobile parade float. The five pound sack of loot at your feet is slowly emptying. You toss the wiggler with the gap teeth a twofer because she really is freaking adorable and she has the good taste to keep going for your jars. Maybe in a sweep or two she’ll figure out they’re not snowglobes, but you plan to abscond with your loot much sooner.

When it comes time to cut the cake, Aradia parts that sucker like Moses through the water, bam, pieces zoom to a phalanx of flying saucers. That will never _not_ be cool, you are _so envious_. She makes the flock of three to ten year olds chase down their portions. She runs a few of them up and over adult guests who aren’t paying attention. You pretend to have absolutely no idea what is going on while you mentally help her pick out targets. You make sure John gets run over twice and she gets no less than three sticky-fingered ankle-biters to go harass Dirk. Sweet, sweet revenge. 

The bouquet toss comes up and Terezi and Bro come to the base of the pile to receive your bouquets. The two of you toss down the spiky bundles in sync, somehow easy and automatic, as if your bodies are in accord without even the mental visualization. The two of them snatch them from the air with an equally synchronized flourish. Dirk cues up “All the Single Ladies”. How predictable. He must be more off his game than you thought.

Your deputies/quasi-custodians solemnly climb up the stairs to one side of the hall, consult for a moment, salute one another with a ridiculous number of flourishes, turn their backs to the throng and chuck your bouquets down. There are four seadwellers in the room. Two go down and Sollux is there to snap pictorial evidence.

Bro and Terezi solemnly fist-bump and share the flask again. You start to push a sense of _is-the-world-ready?_ at Aradia but she’s already there with a joyful _cahoots!_.

“Dahmmit, this is ah stupid tradition, wwhy can’t ya just duel wwith tha fuckin bouquets instead ah tryin for ah seadwwellah?!” This comes from Eridan, the smaller of the two violets. He’s upright already but has his fin clamped to his head on one side with his hand. Kid needs to learn to duck.

You think he’s quadranted or previously quadranted to one of Sollux’s quadrants, you still need diagrams for all these people you’ve never met. He speaks with a _hilarious_ Boston accent and his wedding gift was an actually useful giant book of historical blunders between humans and trolls due to cultural miscommunications. You’re going to google it to be sure it’s not another prank, then you’re going to study the _shit_ out of it. He sounds like an arrogant ass and you already want to adopt him as a little bro and _troll_ him. He’s tinier than _Karkat_.

You push a thought to your Bridezilla: _Eridan-threat-assessment? Viper-and/or-kitten?_

She pushes back a picture of lusus with the front end of a cat, a fishtail, and two mouths with venomous fangs, conveys _yes-viper- and-kitten _and a confident sense of _if-you-want-him-I-will-help-you-housebreak_.

It’s an amused and friendly thought from her end, but disturbing on yours. There’s something in there about _not-at-his-potential-yet_ and you can’t tell if she means “child/wiggler” or “viper-cat-fish-that-hasn’t-yet-learned-to-hunt-and-inject-venom” or both. Or something else entirely. You’re not sure what all the connotations and shadings are but you are definitely not comfortable with owning a person or winding them emotionally around your fingers until they want to be yours, and while that’s not precisely what she “said” it’s _not_ precluded. You deliberately look for the other victim as a distraction.

The larger seatroll, Cronus, gave the both of you a mixtape of “traditional Afterus haunting ballads… an a feww things from _before us_ ”. The CD comes in an actual plastic gem case, this could be terrible or awesome or both, you’ll reserve judgment until you can listen. Cronus is currently busy playing up his injuries to Jane, who’s patting him on the arm and telling him to have some more cake. You can’t actually hear her from here, but you know Jane in management mode. If he’s really injured, she’s Life, she’ll take care of it. He seems more interested in attention than the beads of blood on his forehead. He’s still got death nettle vegetation in his hair.

Kanaya is the last to pile things on the two of you newlyweds, sometime around ten pm as things seem to be winding down. She stands at the bottom of the pile politely with a large purse over her shoulder and nods to Aradia, who zooms her up. Kanaya stands arrow straight as she rises and hovers, looking like Mary Poppins sans umbrella. You feel her gently pull and push at your arms and hands until they face up, your forearms flat as if cradling an invisible baby. Then she plops a giant squirmy grub-worm-thing from her purse into your arms. You stare at the grub. The grub stares at you. Kanaya absconds down the pile before you can words.

The grub is soft and squishy, with a sort of not-quite-exoskeleton on top and tiny poky legs that are currently holding on to you very close to painfully. Kudos to the whatever-it-is, it's got muscles like whoa to enforce that grip. It's got two compound eyes under naked eyelids and its sides are almost velvety and very slick, like the slime coat on a fish. It is bald and has two spots above its eyes that could be future horns, or secondary heads, or hideous fungal infections for all you know. There are two holes that might be ears and it has a nose like Voldemort. You can't tell if it has teeth. It does not look much like grub Aradia or a person of any kind. It's sort of a red-brown color and the lenses of its eyes reflect a rainbow of iridescence. It's awesome and terrible and gross. 

You sit, frozen, with a gorgeous troll draped against one shoulder and a cute squishy larva forming a puddle of rapidly cooling warmth on your arms and lap. You smell like pee and you are sitting on top of all your worldly goods in front of most of the people in the world about whose opinions you in some form care.

You still don’t know if it’s a baby, a sex toy, or dinner. The internet is full of lies and porn.

“Awww,” coos Aradia, without sounding in the least less deadly but also not terribly maternal, “don’t you just want to eat it up.”  She chucks it under the chin and it peeps. You still can’t tell from her voice if that’s option A. You notice she seems entirely uninterested in picking it up or helping you detach it from your forearm. All you get from your connection is a sense of her amusement. You don’t know how to word this.

“Aradia. Aradia, this is _very important_ : are we lusii already?”

“Nonsense, Dave, this deliciously chubby little squish is on loan. It’s supposed to be good luck, future fertility for the happy couple, premise to greatness for the grub, all that. It’s also supposed to ward off bad luck if the kid pees on you, so good job.”

Welp. You guess that solves where baby trolls come from. Vampires.

Aradia hums a bit and the grub hums back with long slow blinks. It’s probably past grubby’s bedtime.

“Unless you _want_ to keep it. I don’t know whose it is, but if it makes you happy, I’ll steal it for you. We’ll name it Carmen Waldoe and hide away in Time like bandits. Do you want to be Robinn Hoodie or Mmmaid Marion?”

She pulls an envelope out from her side of the pile and you recognize it as Jane’s. She dons a stick-on mustache, hands you one, and times her motion just right to get the third onto Carmen before the kid wiggles again and you slap your own mustache on lopsided to catch her(?) in time. (Him? Do grubs have gender?)

Does Aradia really mean that? Not that you want a kid, but that she’d just go rogue like that? Wouldn’t someone miss the kid? Will you have to learn to rein her in? You’re not sure how you feel about that and you try not to push anything at her, envision a wall. This is a fortress of Dave. Check out the pee-moat and its formidable source and move along, nothing to see here.

“Yeah, no, let’s just get to the part where at some point I can grab a shower and we can sleep and nothing disastrous happens before or after.”

“Not so exciting but _very_ practical. Motion carried with votes from Bridezilla and Carmen Waldoe, Chairman Strider.”

You tug at the corner of your missing bath towel, ease it out of the pile without collapsing anything and pad your lap so that hopefully some of the grub pee will be absorbed and the kid’s not sitting in it, and then you feed the little chub wedding cake until it releases its death grip on your arm. Aradia makes faces at it and it makes faces back at the both of you, still in that ridiculous mustache, until Kanaya retrieves her/him/it and your guests allow you to escape to the honeymoon suite.

*

You grab the fastest shower of your life, brush your teeth, and collapse face first in your boxers on the giant bed while contemplating the fact that the best way to encourage family planning is mandatory babysitting. You feel the bed bounce as Aradia finishes her own bedtime routine and it would suddenly be awkward but _you are too tired to care_. Score one for emotional exhaustion; it has finally given you one thing in return for its overlong stay.

You are drifting off to the sound of Aradia brushing her hair when you find out she wasn’t kidding about the shivaree parts. Afterus celebrates wedding nights with howling clowns.

You open the window and it doesn’t get better. There’s an actual crowd of trolls in face paint shouting suggestions about positions and doing a call and answer sermon about STDs. Leaning out the window without a shirt results in a wild whoop and a proposition about “going down on a clown”. Someone else offers to “lick those tats _clean_ , Sugargrub”. Two of them, arms over each other’s shoulders and still wobbly, shout up that they want to “juggle your balls”.

There are clowns on unicycles. Jousting. There are clowns on tandem bicycles. One of them is juggling flaming clubs. There is a baby clown with their lusus, some sort of giraffesque thing with sabre-teeth carrying a toddler-sized squirmy bundle by the back of its poke-a-dot pants. You can’t tell how many are tipsy and how many are drunk on crowd-think. A mob of clowns. It sounds like an unfortunate Afterus weather condition. _Today is cloudy with a chance of dragons and tonight a clown front will be moving in._

There’s a part of you admiring how over-the-top obnoxious this is and a larger part that’s just going _nope, just got my pillow back, gonna romance it like never before, got a schedule to keep, gotta get some Zs in and drool on and figure out this whole married thing_. It’s possible that your frustration conveys itself to your unblushing bride.

Aradia leans in next to you and tosses something at the crowd. The first shoe, one of her sparkly squash heels with a spiky metal flower, hits the short troll who’s making finger in fist motions after another terrible proposition regarding anatomy you don’t have. The second shoe hits the “preacher” who goes down with a swear and springs up clasping her face and waving the shoe triumphantly. One of your dress shoes hits the one-horned one-gloved troll twerking at you and Aradia hands you the last shoe. You wind up and hit the preacher so she goes down again. There’s a whoop of approval and a tussle over who fits the shoes.

“Show’s over!”Aradia shouts with a distinctively Afterian buzz and resonance that simultaneously lifts and crawls entirely differently from the English words. Is she speaking both at once? That is so not fair, you can barely manage your few phrases of Afterian-lite, that is, Afterian-for-humans. The crowd starts to disperse with your footwear, though at least one of the drunk trolls is trying to crawl under a bush. Afterians aren’t necessarily nocturnal, but that one is definitely going to regret the sunrise. Maybe two or three of the crowd were at the wedding, but none of them at the reception, so that raises the question of whether the rest of them got drunk on their own and came over by happenstance, if this was arranged by one of the myriad of people with fingers in your metaphorical wedding pie, or if one of the governments is paying a mob of clowns to get drunk and harass you. Your tax dollars at work. Somehow none of these options seems implausible.

The giraffesque, standing at the edge of where the crowd massed, strides toward the window and lifts their charge up with a grumble-huff-whine that sounds like a question, even to you. Aradia tosses down a sparkly hairpin which could easily double as a stabbing implement and the lusus swings their neck just in time for their charge to snatch it. You get a better look on the upswing, and the kid is probably closer to two or three sweeps than two or three years, but Afterians like their weapons as much as Striders do, you’re not judging. Okay. Maybe a little. The lusus strides off on legs taller than you, entirely unhurried. It still manages to outpace the tandem bicycles.

The rangy troll in dreads that you somehow recognize from Nepeta’s snap of Karkat at the Banns gives Aradia a salute and she salutes back before she shuts the window, locks it, pulls the shade and curtains and tells you that you can relax, Karkat and Tavros will make a list of all the gifts and any damages and no one expects either of you anywhere or anywhen tomorrow. That is the best news anyone’s given you since your birthday three months ago.

You fall asleep back-to-back, your _shit-sorry-let’s-not-get-to-the pants-removing-bit-just-yet_ met with a solid _more-defensible-is-more-comfortable-yes?_. You face the locked door. She faces the locked window.

For once you don’t dream. If she says, “I was relieved to find you again, Dave.” well, you’re already asleep, or perhaps in that suggestible space of lucid dreaming. Nonetheless, you sleep well.

*

(That’s going to be important, you’ll need to get your rest in, because at some point tomorrow you’re going to recognize that tall-and-rangy has the same horns as the wedding cup. Troglodyte will give you a name and some history of how exactly “The Grand Highblood” bit the big one at the hands of Gate Warder Damara Megido and Judicatrice Redglare. (The punchline was something about telling an unfunny joke? But was really about the politics of bloodcastes vs. equality and land rights? Must get an Afterian to explain this stuff.) Somehow _Gamzee Makara_ will be a sufficient key to unlock the luggage of your past life, and past-life-Dave would find that _hilarious_ , just like Future Dave, who hasn’t bothered to pop in and tell you to cool your tits, it’ll all be alright. You are the only Real Dave. All other contenders are dicks.

Is SBURB a past life? You won, or something like it, right? Or someone like you at least. This is the prize. Not too shabby. No to-the-death rites of passage, though the surprise-attack marriage is a bit much. You’re still going to guilt-trip Kankri over not _telling_ you because suddenly a few things will make sense that never did before. (You’d try the same on Terezi, but you doubt it would work.) Does anyone else remember? Is the division clearly “trolls yes, humans no”? Or something else? OMFG, you’re going to troll John with hammer jokes _so_ hard.)

**Author's Note:**

> Shhhh… Let’s let Dave and Aradia get some sleep. Tomorrow morning’s wakeup call will go something like this: 
> 
> “Dave, you should know that there is an absolutely fascinating human custom involving chimney sweeps and fertility that I was unable to procure on your behalf. Just let me know if you need your chimney cleaned, Dave, I shall be very thorough.”


End file.
